May 8 And May 9

The Washington Post reports (5/8/14) that on the 69th anniversary of the end of WW II in Europe, the granddaughter,  Susan Eisenhower, of the commander of the Normandy invasion, Susan Eisenhower, spoke at the WW II memorial in Washington, reciting her grandfather's "Victory Order of the Day," and I shall I quote the opening passages, "Men and women of the Allied Expeditionary Force,...The crusade on which we embarked in the early summer of 1944 has reached its glorious conclusion...Full victory in Europe has been attained."

Today in Moscow, May  9, there will be as there has been for 69 years, a celebration of the victory of the Stalin-led Soviet victory over Hitler's Germany, when at the first celebration the flags of Hitler and his allies were repudiated and massively publicly reviled.

WaPo reported Susan Eisenhower's speech at DC's pathetic WW II memorial (no disrespect to Bob Dole, whose one functioning hand I once shook, and he is responsible for the fact that even this pathetic joke of a memorial exists in Washington), was reported on p.2 as a barely there story.

So, I do not yet have what the ceremony will be in Moscow, but for this one , a day later than the US one, there will be a total national blowout in celebration. The simple explanation for this is that US deaths were a bit under a million, while those in what used to be the USSR were over 20 million.

This celebration invokes the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, where both on the surface agree in celebration, but many, particularly in parts of eastern Ukraine, see it more precisely as a statement of their separate existence from Russia (or the former USSR).

Fortunatel,y the latest reports are that Putin is pulling back troops from the border.  He is discouraging the barely functional separatist referendum in the eastern Ukaine, which was by last report only ready to go in maybe three cities.  Putin knows this is not enough and on this great anniversary he does not want to start another world war,

Barkley Rosser