Dalia Bankauskaite for the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab
It is vital to understand why Russia’s rewriting of history holds dangerous implications for our world today. Vladimir Putin’s June 2020 article, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” shows that Russia has taken the long-practiced Soviet-style rewriting of WWII history to a new level. Putin endorsed a false claim that Russia and the Red Army are the only liberators of Europe and the only victors of WWII. Furthermore, the Kremlin incorporated this idea as a part of their constitution — a state ideology, and thus demand that the world accept this rewritten view of the history of the Second World War.
The article was written for the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.