Russia is approaching a grim milestone: by mid-January, President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine will have dragged on longer than the war on the Eastern Front that began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and ended with the fall of Berlin in May 1945.
Putin is famously obsessed with World War II and official veneration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany is part of the ideological glue that holds together the Russian state. Putin’s Russia has even seen the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin, the Communist dictator who presided over a ruthless purge in the 1930s before leading his country in what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.
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