By Tatiana Gomozova
VOLGOGRAD, Russia (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin is expected to use an event to mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in Stalingrad 80 years ago to rally Russians around his military campaign in Ukraine later on Thursday.
He is due to give a speech in Volgograd, a city in southern Russia which until 1961 was called Stalingrad and was the location of the bloodiest battle of World War Two when the Soviet Red Army, at a cost of over 1 million casualties, broke the back of advancing German forces.
Remembering and paying tribute to those who delivered the victory, widely recognised as a turning point in the war, is sacred in Russia where the authorities have long cast it as an enduring symbol of selfless patriotism and heroic resilience.
Since Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February last year in what he called a “special military operation”, Russian officials have drawn parallels with World War Two and the struggle against the Nazis.
Ukraine – which itself suffered devastation at the hands of Hitler’s forces – rejects those parallels and accuses Russia of waging a war of imperial conquest.
Thousands of people lined Volgograd’s streets on Thursday to watch a victory parade as planes flew overhead and modern and World War Two-era tanks and armoured vehicles trundled through the city centre.
Some of the modern vehicles had the letter ‘V’ painted on them, a symbol used by Russia’s forces fighting in Ukraine.
Some of the city’s main road signs were replaced with ones calling it Stalingrad in tribute.
The focal point for commemorating the victory is a memorial complex to the city’s defenders, located on a hill overlooking the River Volga which is dominated by a hulking statue of a woman wielding a giant sword called The Motherland Calls.
The 1942-43 battle was devastating and reduced the city which bore Josef Stalin’s name to rubble, while claiming an estimated 2 million casualties.
A new bust of Stalin was erected in Volgograd on Wednesday along with two others, of Soviet commanders Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilyevsky.
The industrial city of Tsaritsyn was renamed in honour of Stalin in 1925, but became Volgograd in 1961, eight years after his death, after his legacy fell out of favour.
Despite Stalin’s record of presiding over a famine that killed millions and political repression that killed hundreds of thousands, Russian politicians and school text books have in recent years stressed his role as a successful wartime leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower.
(Reporting by Tatiana Gomozova; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
