“Those who believe they are winning on the battlefield seem to fail to understand that a war with Russia now would be completely different than it was then. We are not the ones who sent our tanks to their borders. But we have a way to respond and it won’t end with the use of tanks. Everyone must understand this”. So the Russian president Vladimir Putin arrived in Volgograd, for one day returned to Stalingrad, the name given to the city by Stalin in 1925. A name that was kept until 1961, to celebrate the surrender of the Germans at the end of the battle which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 and cost the lives of two million people. The defeat of the Sixth Reich Army was the first step towards the victory of the allied forces two years later, the Victory in the Great Patriotic War for Moscow.
The city has recently started to recover the name of Stalingrad on festive occasions. And today the journalists of Rossiya 24 also spoke about Putin’s visit to Stalingrad. And in the military parade organized today, units paraded in the uniform of the NKVD, the infamous security services used by Stalin for great terror.
Putin laid a wreath at the monument of Mamayev Kurgan, the hill where the main battles took place, and where the museum dedicated to those months is located, and where a bust of Stalin was inaugurated yesterday, the second dedicated to the dictator recently in the city. The governor of the region Andrei Bocharov was quarantined for a week in order to meet Putin, as announced by the local broadcaster V1.Ru.
Putin especially takes it out on Germanyin the speech: “It is inconceivable, but it is a fact: we are again threatened by German tanks. As in the Great Patriotic War, German weapons are again used to fight Russia, although this time on Ukrainian territory. But as the Last time, even now Russia will defend itself. We have the tools to do it.”
“We don’t send tanks to their borders, but we have something else to respond with and it won’t be just with armored vehicles,” Putin said, underlining that “those who threaten us don’t seem to understand the simple truth that our entire country, all of us , we grew up and absorbed Russian traditions with our mothers’ milk.” “The generation of victors gave their blood, sweat and tears to create the country we inherited from them,” he said.
“Stalingrad has become the eternal symbol of the invincibility of our people”, Putin declared, recalling that the city and its surroundings “had to be literally rebuilt from scratch” because “not a single tree, a single building remained intact” after the battle with the Nazi forces. “Our moral duty, first of all to the victorious soldiers is to fully honor and preserve the memory of this victory, and to pass it on to our future generations, without allowing anyone to diminish the role of the Battle of Stalingrad in the victory over Nazism , in the liberation of the whole world from this monstrous devil”, the Russian president stressed.
“Russia is concentrating its forces, we all know that. It is preparing to try to get revenge, not only against Ukraine, but against free Europe and the whole free world,” he said for his part. Volodymyr Zelenskyspeaking of the risk of a new Russian offensive coinciding with the first anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, on February 24, in the press conference today in Kiev with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
