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Letter to the editor: Russian ambassador responds
The Russian ambassador has responded to the views of a Ukrainian diplomat, published in an op-ed piece on May 9, on the Soviet Union's collective World War II victory and Russia’s current actions in Ukraine.
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People lay flowers at the eternal flame in front of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, also known as the Victory Museum, at Poklonnaya Hill in western Moscow on May 8, 2025. (AFP/Angelos Tzortzinis)
A
ny article published in a newspaper on May 9 when the majority of mankind celebrates the end of World War II in Europe is a good sign even if it is a piece of writing by Yevhenia Shynkarenko, chargé d'affaires at the Ukrainian Embassy in Indonesia, as appeared in the Opinion section of The Jakarta Post. However there are some objections of mine.
First of all, Russia has never claimed that the great victory in World War II, more widely known in my country as the Great Patriotic War, belongs solely to one country or one nation. On the contrary, we have always emphasized that peoples from all the republics of the former Soviet Union participated in the defeat of the German Nazi regime.
Russians, as the largest ethnic group, formed the backbone of the Red Army, over 5 million Russian soldiers and officers perished in battles defending the country from Moscow to Berlin.
Ukrainians, mobilized in numbers exceeding 7 million, demonstrated heroism in the defense of Kiev, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the storming of the Third Reich’s capital. Belarusians, who sent over 1.3 million of their sons and daughters to the frontlines, not only fought in regular units but also became the core of a massive partisan movement that destabilized the enemy’s rear.
The peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus formed combat divisions and, on the so-called “home front”, supplied the army with food and resources by working in fields and factories. Each of these nations, while preserving their cultural uniqueness, became part of a unified force that crushed fascism.
I stress this fact against the backdrop of statements by a leader of an overseas country who claims to have won World War II, even though the “Western” front in Europe was only opened in June 1944, when the “backbone of the Wehrmacht” had already been broken.
Even here, in Indonesia, we have celebrated this great festive day together with our colleagues from the embassies of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and were ready to welcome Ukrainians, whose predecessors, alongside others, liberated Europe from the yoke of fascism.
