Commentary: In Russia, history is repeating itself: The war in Ukraine has chilling similarities to the Soviet Red Army's actions in WW2, writes Mark Kramer of Harvard's Davis Center (DCRES_Harvard).
Throughout World War II, Stalin showed almost no regard for the lives of his own soldiers. During the Battle of Kyiv in the late summer of 1941, Soviet military commanders pleaded with Stalin to order a strategic retreat. Stalin rejected their entreaties and demanded that they remain in their positions. German Wehrmacht units who had surrounded the Red Army forces moved in and annihilated several hundred thousand.
they were entering a war zone. They thought their units were merely engaging in exercises, and they were shocked to find themselves under deadly fire from a formidable adversary. The resulting high rate of casualties among Russian troops — already far more than the number of Soviet soldiers killed during nineof fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s — is one of the reasons that the morale of Russian soldiers has been so low.
Captured Russian soldiers answer media questions at a press conference in the Interfax news agency in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 5, 2022. The millions of Soviet soldiers who swept into Eastern Europe and Germany in 1943-1945 dismantled and took with them almost anything of value they could find. The looting became so frenzied at times that it kept the Red Army from fulfilling some of its missions.
This coming Monday, Putin will officially commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Soviet and Allied victory over Germany. He will undoubtedly boast of parallels between the Red Army eight decades ago and the Russian army today. He is right that there are parallels, but the examples he will cite will be spurious. The real parallels are ones he will sedulously ignore.
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