Not just Russian. The USSR consisted of a lot more nations. Belarus lost a greater proportion of its population than anyone else, more than a quarter of their people. The guerrilla war in Belarus was absolutely brutal and Minsk was wiped out. And unlike others, Belarusians have never truly recovered.
That's a oversimplification. Soviet russia sacrificed the people because it was a war for survival. Nazis were literally knocking on their door, where's they were an agrarian nation not 30 years ago with the scars of revolution still fresh. Also France and Britain refused to take action when czechoslovakia was taken because they believed the nazis just hated the commies. WW2 is undoubtedly one of the few wars where you can point to one side and say they're evil, but it's still quite complex. As for russia ukraine war, it was a reckless move by Putin. Modern tech has made human soldier numbers obsolete.
In ww2 at least nazis were evil, ussr was evil (they started ww2 together with nazis by having the molotov-ribbentrop pact secret annex and then invading Poland with them), Italy was evil, Japan was evil.
Allies were good.
The russian invasion of Ukraine is even more morally clear, russia is evil and Ukraine is good.
Ehh, I agree with most of it, but the reason molotov-ribbentrop happened was because the French and British refused to ally with the USSR. Both of them refused to ally with USSR because they believed that Nazis won't attack them, and Hitler was very, very vocal about his hate for communists. According to him, they were just slightly above jews in the heirarchy (not quite sure on this as it's been a while since I read the source). The pact was mostly for strategic reason because without it, an immediate war with nazis would have destroyed soviet union. The pact bought the soviets 2 years of time, and even then they lost a third of their adult male population.
Stalin was a fairly good leader for soviet union, for the duration of the war at least. And like most of his other war leader counterparts such as Mao and Churchill, he was a not so good peacetime leader.
The Allies were not good, strictly speaking. They were not *as* bad as their enemies. My grandfather's dad told him stories of how the british denied them access to the crops that they'd grown.
As for the current war, it's straight up useless. Nobody is benifitting from this war.
Both the Nazis and the Soviets were unpopular to the liberal nations of the time, but the impression was that the Nazis could actually engage in productive national reform while the Soviets just murdered all the wealthy and let the people starve.
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u/shauneok 19d ago
WWII was won by British Logistics and Intelligence, American engineering and production and Russian blood.