Russia celebrates defeat of Nazis

MOSCOW – Russia marked the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on Wednesday with soldiers bearing hammer-and-sickle banners goose-stepping through Red Square and President Vladimir Putin sending a veiled warning to Estonia over its relocation of a Soviet war memorial.

On one of the most cherished holidays in the Russian calendar, veterans bedecked with medals joined officials across the country to lay flowers at graves and bask in the memory of the 1945 victory, one of the most glorious feats in the nation’s past.

An estimated 27 million people died during the conflict known to most Russians as the Great Patriotic War, and much of the western part of the country was ravaged during four years of battles.

Speaking from a podium in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum, Putin hailed Victory Day as “the holiday of huge moral importance and unifying power.”

He also honored the contribution of Western allies to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Germany but appeared to take a swipe at the United States, saying that the world now sees threats to peace “based on the same disrespect for human life, claims to global exclusiveness and dictate, just as it was in the Third Reich.”

Putin also alluded to anger over last month’s removal of a Red Army memorial from a square in Tallinn, capital of the former Soviet republic of Estonia. Estonia, like its Baltic neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, pays tribute to the Red Army for driving out the Nazis, but also portrays Soviet troops as occupiers who helped keep it under communist control for a half century.