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This week marked 85 years since Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the greatest crime of aggression in human history. This week, too, German panzers with their distinctive Iron Cross insignia were rolling towards Russia’s border, along with other NATO partners in a military exercise cynically misnamed Operation Freedom Shield.
It is truly shocking how history on such a criminal scale is being repeated, brazenly and seemingly with public insouciance.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched the biggest military invasion ever recorded in history. Operation Barbarossa deployed three million German troops along with units from allied countries. The Blitzkrieg opened the largest theater of World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. At least 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed, most of them civilians. Grainy footage from the time shows line after line of people being shot and dumped in mass graves. In one notorious atrocity, in September 1941, over 33,000 civilians were executed in just two days at a ravine in Babi Yar, near Kiev.
Four years later, the Soviet Red Army fought the Nazi Wehrmacht all the way back to final defeat in Berlin.
Every Russian family was traumatized by the horror and inhumane suffering. The memory of the calamity remains seared in the nation’s consciousness. The Nazi invasion was carried out as a war of annihilation in which there was no mercy for men, women, and children. The Final Solution involved the systematic extermination of Slavs, Jews, Communists, and Roma and others considered Untermenschen (Subhuman) by Nazi racial ideology. The German Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen death squads were assisted by fascist auxiliaries in Lithuania, the other Baltic states, and Ukraine.
Eighty-five years later to the day, on June 22, 2026, the German army-led NATO exercises began in Lithuania. The very location of the NATO military maneuvers this week, Probradė, about 15 kilometers from the Belarus border, was the scene of massacres by the Nazis and their proxies.
The echo of Operation Barbarossa is odiously loud and clear. German Minister of Defense [sic], Boris Pistorius, officiated at the NATO military exercises this week. There was no shame or embarrassed commentary in Western media.
There is no way that the date was a foolish oversight. It was a deliberate provocation. German militarism is on the march again and is verbally aimed at Russia. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared the ambition of making Germany the biggest military power in Europe. NATO commanders talk glibly about striking Russian territory with long-range missiles and drones.
As in WWII, Lithuania, the Baltic states, and Ukraine are serving as the proxies for aggression against Russia.
In recent years, these countries have reawakened fascist tendencies by venerating military collaborators with Nazi Germany. Monuments dedicated to Waffen SS brigades have been unveiled in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine. Only last month, a notorious Ukrainian Nazi wartime leader, Andrey Melnyk, was given an official reburial in Kiev with full state honors attended by the puppet president, Vladimir Zelensky. This has led to a bitter row with Poland because Melnyk and his Ukrainian paramilitaries were responsible for murdering over 100,000 Poles. Notably, the European capitals and NATO are trying to cover up the controversy because it exposes the true, ugly nature of the Kiev regime. If the regime is exposed, then what does that say about NATO and the EU? It would demolish their claims about “defending Ukrainian democracy” from Russia and how Ukraine is supposedly a bulwark for the rest of Europe.
The glorification of Ukrainian collaborators is not a marginal, random occurrence. There is a wider tendency right across Europe among the political class to rewrite the history of the Second World War and whitewash the monstrous aggression against the Soviet Union. This effort is due to the contemporary resurrection of Russophobia that underpins the policy of the EU and NATO. The American and European leaders, known as the Collective West, are driven by the strategic objective of defeating Russia to exploit its vast natural resources. It is the same objective that drove Nazi Germany and its European accomplices.
As in 1941, today NATO propaganda inverts reality by accusing Russia of posing an imminent threat that must be defended against. All of Europe is being mobilized and militarized, with warnings of preparation for war with Russia. The drums of war are beaten with a frenzy. European societies are being destroyed by the relentless militarism, the wasting of economies, and obsessive hostility towards Russia.
NATO, which was formed in 1949, is carrying on where Nazi Germany failed. The same propaganda tropes are invoked to portray Russians as barbarians who must be vanquished for the sake of peace and security.
American, British, German, French, and other NATO missiles and drones are striking deep inside Russia, killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure. As in Operation Barbarossa, the enemy is targeting Moscow.
It is incredible that, within living memory, the horrendous crimes of Nazi Germany are being repeated against the Russian people.
It is incredible, too, how barefaced the repetition of history is conducted.
How could such an outrage be perpetrated? This is due to the propaganda power of the Western corporate-controlled news media.
War against Russia is sold as peace. Aggression is sold as defense. This same media cover up the rehabilitation of Nazis in Ukraine and the Baltic states.
When German tanks and artillery emblazoned with the Iron Cross are rolling towards Russia’s borders, the Western public should be deeply alarmed about what is unfolding. But tragically, not enough people are aware of the danger because the propaganda system known as the news media has lied so systematically. The truth is, European and American leaders are courting a world war that will result in millions of deaths.
Nazi Germany’s ambitions of conquering Russia were born from imperialist aims, supremacist ideology, and propaganda lies. Western imperialism and its NATO weapons, proxies, and media are at it again.
