Putin arrives in Crimea for Victory Day events as deadly Ukraine clashes erupt

[uhnope]

Source: CNN

Sevastopol, Crimea (CNN) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Crimea on Friday to take part in Victory Day celebrations in Sevastopol, in what is his first visit to the disputed territory since Russia annexed it from Ukraine.

The President arrived in the port of Sevastopol by sea, in an event televised by Russian state TV, and watched while flanked by senior officers as Russian warships took part in a naval display in the Black Sea.

The military parades, held each year to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany, come amid soaring tensions in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are planning a weekend referendum on autonomy.

At least seven people were killed and 39 others were injured in clashes between separatists and Ukrainian government forces in the flashpoint southeastern city of Mariupol, the Donetsk regional health department said Friday.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/09/world/europe/ukraine-crisis/

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This dictator who threatens the world with WW3 also said the Russia saved Europe from "slavery" (see below) . What a joke--the USSR was a giant gulag slave state before, during and especially after WW2, and enslaved central and eastern Europe until 1989. This is the history that Putin is rushing to celebrate.

But then again, Russia doesn't have much to be proud of since helping defeat the Nazis, so of course Putin's going to have a patriotic cow over it. "S odnoy korovy k sleduyushchemu korovy."

http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/putin-soviets-saved-europe-from-slavery-1.1685739#.U218Jlfoics

Putin: Soviets saved Europe from slavery

Moscow - Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the Soviet role in defeating fascism on Friday, the anniversary of the World War 2 victory over Nazi Germany, and said those who defeated fascism must never be betrayed.
...
“The iron will of the Soviet people, their fearlessness and stamina saved Europe from slavery. It was our country which chased the Nazis to their lair, achieved their full and final destruction, won at the cost of millions of victims and terrible hardships,” Putin said.

[Igel]

1. That's the meme.

The USSR pretty much beat Hitler alone while the West cooled its heels.

Depending on how things are going with the West, what the West was doing takes two forms. If things are good, they were just waiting until the USSR bore the brunt of Hitler's wrath and it was safe for Britain and the US to get involved again. If things weren't going so well with the West, the West was rooting for Hitler and only got involved when it was clear that Stalin would liberate all of Europe and they'd be isolated and impotent.

In the Pacific, the USSR's role was every bit as heroic. Having vanquished Hitler in the West, it turned its attention East. It's not a coincidence that as soon as the mighty USSR got involved against Japan the Japanese militarists sued for peace with the US and Britain, seeking protection from certain downfall. (Nagasaki and Hiroshima had nothing to do with Japan's surrender--they were just examples of the West's depravity, trying to scare the mighty Soviet Union by using Japan as an example.) It was really the USSR that won the war in the Pacific, too.

In the '90s there was a brief gap in which the US, Britain, and others were found to have suffered. Then that gap closed and again it was the mighty Russians against the West, as it had been the Russian state against Hitler and Japan. (The careful observer might notice that the words "USSR" and "Soviet" morphed into "Russian." All Soviet achievements were Russian achievements by the time Putin was elected; soon after that, Stalin's "excesses" became inconvenient and then uncomfortable to mention, and now they're out of the schoolbooks again. The conflation of "Soviet" and "Russian," always denigrated in the West as ignorant and simplistic, was commonplace among Russians, and there was real antagonism when there was a period of affirmative action for non-Russians in the Soviet hierarchy.)