It is easy to get cross with Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader used the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to deliver a Soviet-style propaganda speech, claiming the lion’s share of the suffering and the glory. Forty per cent of victims of the Holocaust, he told a ceremony at Yad Vashem in Israel, were “Soviet”— an exaggerated claim that overlooks the inconvenient detail that the “Soviet” tag was involuntary. Before the German attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin had seized places with big Jewish populations, such as Poland and Lithuania.

The indubitable fact that the Soviet military broke Hitler’s war machine does not make the victory “Russian”. Most of the fighting and civilian casualties were not in Russia, but in nowadays Ukraine and Belarus.