Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday tweeted a ridiculous D-Day message.

#Zakharova: The Normandy landings were not a game-changer for the outcome of WWII and the Great Patriotic War. The outcome was determined by the Red Army’s victories – mainly, in Stalingrad and Kursk. For three years, the UK and then the US dragged out opening the second front pic.twitter.com/LhzkEzNCQN — MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) June 5, 2019

Zakharova wasn't done, adding, "Even if it was late, the opening of the second front was aimed at supporting Soviet troops in their combat missions. In fact, we ended up helping our Western allies who were defeated by the Nazis in the Ardennes."

This is not true.

The non-Soviet allies waited to launch their European offensive in order to consolidate the gains made in Africa, and to ensure strategic overmatch once the offensive began. Nor did the Soviets save the Americas at the Ardennes. That winter 1944-1945 situation, in which many units were encircled, flowed from a desperate German offensive that got nowhere near its ultimate strategic objective of retaking the Belgian port of Antwerp from the allies. And it was Patton's 3rd Army which broke the trapped allied forces free, not the Soviets.

Zakharova is also wrong about the broader import of the Normandy landings for the course of the war.

Those landings ensured that the Axis would be enveloped and forced to commit its forces beyond breaking point. D-Day also ensured that Western Europe would not fall under Soviet tyranny at the war's conclusion. It was thus an operation of two liberations: one from the Nazis and one preemptive liberation from communism.

Amazingly, Zakharova also gets the Eastern Front wrong. The Soviet destruction of the Wehrmacht's 6th Army at Stalingrad was not so much a result of Soviet strategic mastery as it was of Hitler's idiotic decision to let his forces become surrounded. The battle's outcome was then made inevitable and hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were captured. Nor did the Kursk victory drive the outcome on the Eastern Front as much as the relentless Soviet offensives that followed it along a broad front, breaking Germany's back in the East.

Even then, Zakharova's argument ignores two fundamental truths about the grand-strategic level of the war. First, that without American and British bomber aircraft laying waste to German industry, Hitler would have reinforced his armored divisions and restrained Soviet advances in the East. Zakharova also, absurdly, fails to note the massive Anglo American provision of materiel to Stalin, which allowed the Soviets to move from a defensive war of strategic depth to an offensive war.

Yes, Zakharova needs to pick up a history book. But I suspect she has other, more ideological reasons for her ill-judged claims.