Ukraine 'Was Just Occasion to Square Old Accounts'

Russia's Victory Day parade on May 9 reflects mass attitudes in the country, Grigori Nedyalkov, a Bulgarian journalist, has said.

He has pointed to the nearly 14 000 different commemorative events across Russia "from Kaliningrad [in the west] to Kamtchatka [in the east-most end of Russia] and to the 20 million participants, with Russian President Vladimir Putin also having taken part in the Moscow parade bearing a portrait of his father who also took part in World War Two.

In his words, all this "speaks for itself" as the parade was "an impressive show of military might".

Asked by Novinite to comment on the events around the May 8 and May 9 anniversaries and on recent tensions in the relations between Russia and Western nations, whose leaders boycotted en masse the Victory Day celebrations.  

In his words, "if the strategist [Carl von] Clausewitz said that "war is a mere continuation of politics by other means", then the boycott... could be viewed as a continuation of the current policy on the Kremlin with something like a "psychological operation". We are still in the phase of "playing the nervous game", Putin is still being punished over Ukraine."

But to avoid accusation of downplaying Russian World War Two victims, some politicians such as Italian President Giorgio Napolitano have kept pointing to the recognition of Russia's role in the war, Nedyalkov opined.

Asked whether the West and Russia are showing they have failed to learn lessons of WWII, he explained:

"The lesson learned from the last century is that the "appeasement policy" applied to Hitler until 1939 shows the utter helplessness of liberal democracies against the Nazi march in Europe. Now the situation is delicate, because on the one...