Russian Flag at half mast, courtesy of Wikimedia website of the President of the Russian Federation and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 www.kremlin.ru.
Since the early 2000s, Kremlin propagandists have been equating Ukrainian democratic forces with nationalists and Nazis, while employing practices — mass deportations, cultural erasure and systematic violence against civilians — that mirror the very crimes they claim to be fighting against.
The lesson to be learned from 1418 days of genocide against Ukrainians is that the myth of Russia’s strength and invincibility has already shattered. Even with the backing of China, Iran, North Korea and enablers like Cuba and Venezuela, Russia — by far the largest military spender in Europe — cannot defeat Ukraine outright.
Russia’s total war spending is projected at roughly $540 billion since the full-scale invasion, taking into account wider defense and security spending, compensation to soldiers’ families, etc. Meanwhile, total Western support of all types is about $380 billion.
The contrast with 1941-45 is stark. The Soviet Army in World War II pushed Nazi forces back roughly 1,500-1,800 kilometers west, from the outskirts of Moscow to the streets of Berlin.
Russia’s deepest sustained positions in Ukraine since 2022, by contrast, extend only several tens of kilometers from its own border in the east and south, and Moscow still cannot fully seize the Donbas region it has claimed and annexed since 2014.
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This legacy is often obscured in contemporary narratives that implicitly equate the U.S.S.R.’s achievements with Russia’s, erasing Ukraine’s agency and distorting historical benchmarks used to judge today’s battlefield performance. Re-centering Ukraine’s role in the Soviet victory helps explain why modern Ukrainian forces, drawing on a deep martial tradition of their own, have proven capable of resisting and, in many sectors, halting the army that still claims Soviet glory as exclusively Russian.
Slava Ukraine!
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