.png)
By Olena Liashenko
Creative Director, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation
Every year on May 9th, Russia commemorates Victory Day with grand military parades, celebrating the Soviet Union's role in defeating Nazi Germany. However, beneath the surface of these celebrations lies a grim history of atrocities committed by the Red Army—acts that the Kremlin prefers to keep buried.
The Katyn Massacre: A Silenced Genocide
In 1940, the Soviet secret police (NKVD) executed approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, intellectuals, and other elites in the Katyn Forest and other locations. For decades, the Soviet Union denied responsibility, falsely attributing the massacre to Nazi Germany. It wasn't until 1990 that the Soviet government officially acknowledged its role in the atrocity.
Learn more about Katyn Massacre
Bucha massacre
The Bucha massacre stands as one of the clearest examples of atrocities committed by the Russian army during its invasion of Ukraine. According to a UN report, in the first six weeks of occupation, at least 441 civilians were violently killed in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions—among them 341 men, 72 women, 20 boys, and 8 girls. The actual number is likely higher, with the UN still working to verify an additional 198 cases. These killings were not battlefield accidents—they were systematic executions, often carried out in homes, streets, and makeshift detention sites under Russian control.
An analysis of three Russian nationalist Telegram channels, with tens of thousands of subscribers responding to the news of the massacre, reported that 144 comments – almost half – of those made within the first 48 hours demanded that Russian forces act even more violently. Many of the comments included ethnically motivated calls for violence against Ukrainians, many of them advocating genocide. The Telegram channels have also been used to sell t-shirts with the letters "V" and "Z" and the slogan "Slaughter in Bucha: We Can Do It Again."[197]
Learn more about Bucha Massacre
Watch short video from CNN about Bucha Massacre
Ethnic Cleansing through Forced Deportations
The Soviet regime orchestrated the mass deportation of entire ethnic groups, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis. In 1944, over 190,000 Crimean Tatars were forcibly relocated to Central Asia, with many perishing due to the harsh conditions. Similarly, the Chechen and Ingush populations faced brutal deportations, leading to significant loss of life.
Read about Crimean Tatar deportation
Russia is Kidnapping and Re-educating Ukraine's Children
Since the start of its full-scale invasion, Russia has systematically abducted and re-educated Ukrainian children—severing their ties to family, identity, and nation. According to Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, over 19,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported to Russia or Russian-occupied territories. Many were placed in “re-education” camps, adopted into Russian families, or given falsified birth certificates to conceal their origins. Vulnerable children—orphans, those with disabilities, or from military families—were specifically targeted. These actions, ordered at the highest levels of the Russian government, have been recognized by the ICC as potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. To date, only 1,236 children have been returned. The rest remain lost—by design.
Read the report of the Institute for the Study of War
Systematic Looting and Plunder
As the Red Army pushed westward, it engaged in extensive looting, seizing cultural artifacts, industrial equipment, and personal property from occupied territories. These actions were often state-sanctioned, justified as "war reparations," and have left a lasting impact on cultural heritage.
The iconic photo of Soviet soldiers raising the flag over the Reichstag in May 1945 is often portrayed as a symbol of heroism. However, the image was staged—the flag was brought from Moscow, the scene re-shot for dramatic effect, and one soldier’s second wristwatch was later airbrushed out by Soviet censors to hide what it truly was: evidence of looting.
Looting was not an exception but widespread and tolerated among Red Army troops. Soldiers stripped homes, museums, and civilians of valuables—watches, jewelry, bicycles, even entire factory equipment—claiming it as revenge or reparation. In the photo above, a Soviet soldier is seen forcibly seizing a bicyclefrom a German woman in front of a crowd. Her resistance is not just desperation—likely, that bicycle was her only way to survive or escape from the destroyed city.
Read About Looting by the Soviet Army in Austria
The Soviet army’s looting during WWII—of homes, valuables, and cultural treasures—set a precedent that Russia follows today in Ukraine. From electronics and livestock to historical artifacts, Russian troops are once again treating civilian property as spoils of war, continuing a legacy of state-enabled plunder.
Read the Investigation: Looting by Russian Soldiers in Ukraine
Mass Rape as a Weapon of War
As Soviet troops advanced into Eastern Europe and Germany, they perpetrated widespread sexual violence.
This powerful and disturbing photograph, taken in 1945 in postwar Germany, captures two Soviet soldiers aggressively handling a terrified German woman in public. While the exact source of the image is often unverified, it has become emblematic of the widespread sexual violence perpetrated by the Red Army during its occupation of Eastern and Central Europe. Historians estimate that 1 to 2 million German women were rapedby Soviet soldiers in 1944–45, many of them gang-raped, mutilated, or killed afterward. These crimes were not isolated incidents but a widespread phenomenon—often tolerated or ignored by Soviet command—and they remain one of the most silenced atrocities of World War II.
Read about the continuum of sexual violence in occupied germany, 1945-49
Shockingly, this legacy of violence has not only gone unacknowledged in Russia but is often glorified. A particularly chilling example is the slogan “В Берлин за немками!!!”(“To Berlin for the German women!”), which was scrawled across Soviet military vehicles in 1945 and continues to be displayed by Russians on their cars during Victory Day celebrations on May 9. This phrase, still used today in pro-war and nationalist circles, is not about love or relationships—it’s a thinly veiled celebration of mass rape as a form of revenge and domination. Its resurgence each year reveals how Putin’s Russia has transformed war crimes into patriotic folklore, fueling militarism and dehumanizing narratives under the guise of victory commemoration.
This photo, combined with the slogan, serves as a harrowing reminder that the “Great Victory” Russia celebrates on May 9 comes with a dark underside: one built not just on military triumph, but on suffering, silence, and the systematic violation of human dignity.
The brutal scenes of rape and sexual violence emerging from Ukraine today are not unprecedented—they echo a horrifying legacy carried over from World War II. Just as Soviet soldiers raped over a million women across Eastern Europe in 1944–45—with gang rapes, public assaults, and lasting trauma dismissed or denied—Russian troops are now repeating these crimes on Ukrainian soil. In places like Bucha, reports have surfaced of women as young as 14 being held in basements, gang-raped, impregnated, and told by their attackers that they would be “raped to the point where they wouldn’t want sex with any man”—a chilling echo of the Red Army’s use of rape as psychological warfare. According to Human Rights Watch and the UN, these are not isolated acts of “rogue soldiers,” but patterns of violence occurring with command-level awareness or even tacit approval. In both eras, Russia not only denies the crimes—but fosters a culture of impunity, masking atrocities beneath a narrative of heroism and "liberation." What Putin’s regime glorifies on May 9 with parades and slogans like “To Berlin for the German women!” is not just a misrepresentation of history—it is a reenactment of it, with Ukrainian women now the victims of the same state-enabled violence their grandmothers once suffered.
Read the Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine
Read about the sexual violence in the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wikipedia
How Russians Glorify Domination Through Sexual Violence
One of the most grotesque yet revealing expressions of Russian militarism today is the widespread use of car stickers showing sexually explicit cartoon figures: a Soviet symbol raping a Nazi symbol, or more recently, a Russian-flagged figure raping one in the colors of the U.S. or Ukraine. These are not just vulgar jokes. They are the visual language of an ideology where rape is celebrated as a symbol of domination—a “victory” not only over nations, but over their dignity, autonomy, and humanity.
In Russian prison culture, which heavily shapes broader notions of masculinity and punishment, rape—known as “опущение” (literally, being “lowered”)—is the ultimate form of humiliation. It marks someone as permanently degraded and socially erased. This logic, forged behind prison walls, now plays out on the battlefield. When Russian troops raped German women by the millions during WWII, it was framed not as a crime but as revenge. Today, Russian soldiers use the same logic in Ukraine—with documented cases of gang rapes, forced pregnancies, and sexualized torture of civilians.
These crimes are not spontaneous acts of lust. They are calculated performances of power. As Harvard scholar Dara Kay Cohen notes, gang rape in wartime is often a deliberate tactic—meant to terrorize, humiliate, and erase identity, especially when victims are women and girls. In Bucha, Russian troops told women they would be raped “so they would never want a man again”—a goal not of satisfaction, but of erasure.
The fact that these violations are openly mocked, visualized, and glorified in popular Russian culture—on bumper stickers, in slogans like “To Berlin for the German women!”, and in online memes—shows that this isn’t just a military tactic. It’s an ideology. Rape, in this worldview, is not a failure of discipline; it is an expression of power.
As long as Russia continues to celebrate its military past without confronting the crimes committed by the Red Army—and while it repeats those same crimes in Ukraine—the world must call this what it is: not a fight for justice, but a campaign of degradation.
Inhumane Treatment of Prisoners of War
One of the most consistently brutal aspects of Soviet conduct during World War II was its treatment of prisoners of war, particularly those from the Axis powers. Despite declaring adherence to international law, including the Hague Regulations, the Soviet Union routinely violated both international conventions and its own policies. The most infamous example is the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which nearly 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the NKVD—clearly illustrating that Soviet POW policies were shaped more by ideology than law. Throughout the Eastern Front campaign, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau documented thousands of cases of Soviet troops torturing and executing German, Italian, and other Axis POWs, often on the spot or shortly after interrogation.
Approximately 3 million German POWs were captured by the Soviet Union, with many subjected to forced labor under brutal conditions. A significant number perished due to starvation, disease, and exposure, reflecting the harsh realities of Soviet captivity. According to eyewitness accounts and captured Soviet documents, these acts were not the work of undisciplined soldiers but were frequently incited by political commissars and carried out under direct orders from Stalin’s regime.
Tragically, these patterns have resurfaced in modern Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian POWs have been subjected to summary executions, torture, sexual violence, and humiliating forced confessions—all in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Videos verified by international media show Russian forces castrating, executing, and mocking Ukrainian prisoners. Just as the Soviet Union used public declarations of humane treatment as a propaganda mask while secretly sanctioning atrocities, the Kremlin today denies war crimes even in the face of overwhelming evidence. What we are witnessing is not a breakdown in discipline—but the continuation of a military culture where brutality against the captured is a tool of war, not a deviation from it.
Why This Matters Today:
The Russian government's glorification of the Red Army and its victory in WWII serves as a tool for nationalist propaganda, overshadowing the atrocities committed during that period.
The truth about WWII is not just history—it’s a warning.
Russia’s manipulation of memory fuels its wars today.
By defending historical truth, we defend peace, justice, and the future.