Channel 4 News published this video item, entitled “Putin claims Russian troops are ‘defending the motherland’ from the West” – below is their description.
Pristine lines of goose-stepping soldiers, gleaming military hardware, stirring music – and President Putin invoking the glorious past of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
Usually this is the annual display of super power nostalgia. But this year it is also supposed to justify what the Russian leader still refuses to call a war in a country he still refuses to call by name. But the reality of that war in Ukraine is far from victorious and even the fly past of the Russian air force was absent this year, apparently because of bad weather.
Channel 4 News YouTube Channel
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In This Story: Soviet Union
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, it was a one-party state (until 1990) governed by the Communist Party, with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian SFSR.
The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire.
On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the remaining twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union’s rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality.
