Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany in 1941 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin walls in Moscow, June 22, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Alexei Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
Who Won The War? Russians Take A Different View On D-Day -- Reuters
(Reuters) - Sitting in the shade on a bench in the center of Moscow, 77-year-old Galina Makarenko pauses for several seconds before delivering her blunt opinion on the Allied D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
"It helped us a little. But only a little," says the sprightly physicist, who was evacuated from Moscow to Kazakhstan to escape the conflict that Westerners call World War Two and Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War.
President Vladimir Putin joins the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Germany to mark the 70th anniversary on Friday of the Normandy landings that opened the western front against Hitler's forces, catching them in a giant pincer movement as Stalin's Red Army pushed them back in the east.
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My Comment: I have a different take from this Reuters article. Most people in Russia do know that the Allied effort to defeat Germany (and Japan) was just that .... an Allied effort. And while the great battles and sky-high casualty rates were on the Eastern front .... the invasion of Normandy was essential to expedite the end of the war. If the D-Day invasion never occurred, the Russians would still have defeated Germany .... but the human and economic cost would have been even more enormous to both Germany and Russia .... and the recovery for both countries would have taken decades instead of a few years.
