Speech at the Military Parade in Honour of the 60th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War
May 9, 2005
Red Square, Moscow
Выступление на Военном параде в честь 60-й годовщины Победы в Великой Отечественной войне
9 мая 2005 года
Москва, Красная площадь
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: Dear citizens of Russia!
Distinguished guests!
Comrade soldiers and sailors, sergeants, sergeant-majors and warrant officers!
Comrade officers, generals and admirals!
I congratulate you on this, the sixtieth anniversary of our great victory! I congratulate you on this celebration of peace and triumph of justice, this day that marks the victory of good over evil and of freedom over tyranny.
Sixty years have now passed. But every year on May 9 the memory of the war appeals to our reason, committing us to great responsibility and making us realise with more acuteness just how close the world came at that time to plunging into an irreversible abyss. On this day we see more clearly just what monstrous consequences violence, racial intolerance, genocide and outrage committed against people could have had.
We will never forget that these enormities bring people nothing but fear, humiliation and death.
We will always honour all those who fought on the frontlines and those who selflessly toiled in the rear.
We will mourn the dead and pay them the debt of gratitude of those who they saved.
The Second World War caught up 61 countries and almost 80 percent of the Earths population in its inferno. This hurricane of fire blazed a trail of destruction not only across Europe but also across Asia and Africa. It reached all the way to Novaya Zemlya and Alaska, to the frontiers of Egypt and Australia.
But the most ruthless and decisive events -- the events that determined the drama and the outcome of this inhuman war -- unfolded on the territory of the Soviet Union. The Nazis counted on rapid enslavement of our people. Their intention was to destroy our country.
Their plans failed. First, the Soviet army halted the Nazi advance outside Moscow. Then, over the next three years, not only did they hold the enemy in check but were able to drive it back, back into its own lair.
The battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, the courage of besieged Leningrad and the successes at Kursk and on the Dnieper decided the outcome of World War II. Through the liberation of Europe and the battle for Berlin the Red Army brought the war to its victorious conclusion.
Dear friends!
We never divided victory into ours and theirs. We will always remember our allies the United States, Great Britain, France and the other countries who fought in the anti-Nazi coalition, the German and Italian anti-fascists. Today we pay tribute to the courage of all Europeans who resisted Nazism.
But we also know that the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of its citizens during those years of war. And people of every nationality in the former Soviet Union were among the soldiers who gave their lives on the battlefields.
All the peoples and all the republics of the Soviet Union suffered irreplaceable losses. Grief entered every home, every family. May 9 is therefore a sacred date for all the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
We all share a common grief, common memory and common duty to future generations. It is our obligation to hand down to our descendants this spirit of historical kinship, common objectives and hopes.
I am sure that there can be no alternative to our brotherhood and friendship.
Russia seeks to build relations that are not only forged by the lessons of the past but that are also reaching out towards our common future, both with our closest neighbours and with all countries of the world.
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В.Путин.Выступление на торжественном приеме.27.03.07by niknikolay2,978 views
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