WITH Russian-backed separatists apparently winning the war in eastern Ukraine, Kiev's western allies are taking to the battlefields of the past to gain at least the satisfaction of undermining Moscow's historic pretensions. Poland has taken the lead in historical warfare. Last month Grzegorz Schetyna, the foreign minister and a historian, pointed out that the first Red Army trooper to drive a tank through the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp was actually Ukrainian. Now Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland's president and also a historian, wants to steal Russia's thunder during celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war.

Russia has traditionally marked the end of the war on May 9th by staging a massive military parade on Red Square. (Last year's parade, featuring both Soviet and Russian symbols, is pictured above.) This year Moscow has invited a host of foreign dignitaries to attend. But the prospect of reviewing the troops of the Russian army, which illegally took control of Crimea last year and is now fighting alongside separatists in eastern Ukraine, leaves most western leaders cold. Mr Komorowski, Barack Obama and other heads of state have declined the Russian invitation. Instead, Mr Komorowski suggests that celebrations be held in Gdansk, where a German invasion started the war in 1939. The Polish ceremony would be held on May 8th, the date recognised as the end of the war by every country except the Soviet Union and some of its successor states.

Polish diplomats are also sounding out their western counterparts about the idea of holding the commemoration in Berlin, the city where the conflict truly ended. The Poles have annoyed the Russians by repeatedly pointing out that in 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany to carve up eastern Europe between them. They have also reminded eastern Europeans that the Red Army, after defeating the Germans in 1945, brought them oppression rather than freedom. Mr Schetyna says he is trying to counter Moscow's highly effective “historical politics” campaign, in which ”everything that was bad in the history of the USSR was the Stalinists and the KGB, and everything that was good is Russia's inheritance.”

Moscow has retaliated with a propaganda effort targeting the Polish foreign minister directly. On February 8th Mr Schetyna was the subject of a 10-minute special report on Russia's Channel 5, which like all Russian television stations is under Kremlin control. The report ridiculed the Polish minister by showing a caricature of him standing on a column in Warsaw holding a pitchfork, dressed in shorts decorated with the Polish and Canadian flags. (Mr Schetyna worked briefly as a gardener while living in Canada as a young man in the 1980s.) An amused Mr Schetyna later said the programme was a sign that Russia was “bothered” by Poland's historical jabs.

The Baltic countries, which spent 1945 to 1991 as constituent republics of the Soviet Union, also have an acute sense of Russian historical sensitivities. They have annoyed Moscow for years by comparing the Soviet regime to Nazi Germany, and by proposing to alter or remove Soviet-era monuments. None of the three Baltic presidents will attend the May 9th ceremony in Moscow. An irritated Alexander Veshnyakov, Russia's ambassador to Latvia, called a special news conference to announce that “revision of history is a provocation, and Russia cannot tolerate this.”

While such historical sniping may seem esoteric, it is part of a propaganda struggle over Russia's rationalisations for intervening in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has justified Russia's annexation of Crimea by describing it as the site where Vladimir the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus (claimed as a founding father by both Russia and Ukraine), was baptised in 988. Russia incorrectly claims that the current government in Kiev is dominated by fascists and sympathisers of Stepan Bandera, the wartime Ukrainian leader, whose supporters sometimes opposed and sometimes collaborated with Germany. (Bandera's followers also massacred large numbers of Poles and Jews.) Mr Putin has compared the Ukrainian army's operations in Donetsk to the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

Poles have good reason to be wary of how Russia plans to commemorate the war. After collaborating with Hitler to conquer their country, the Soviet regime executed some 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in 1940 in the so-called Katyn massacres, hoping to annihilate the country's leadership class and forestall resistance to communist rule. Over 500,000 Polish civilians were deported to the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941. In 1944 Soviet forces, having advanced to within kilometres of Warsaw (after the Germans drove them out of Poland in 1941), encouraged the Polish resistance in the city to launch an uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Red Army units then stood back as the Germans crushed the partisans, killed 150,000 people and levelled the city, again wiping out an indigenous force that might have proved troublesome to the Soviets' plans to impose a communist government. Poles find the idea of ceremonies in Moscow celebrating the Red Army as a liberating force to be repellent.

Mr Schetyna is pleased by the Russians' “nervous reaction” to his proposals for an alternative memorial ceremony. Polish efforts to persuade European countries to provide Ukraine with military aid have so far been fruitless. Contesting Moscow's self-serving versions of history and undermining anniversary ceremonies that promote Russian militarism are a less significant gesture, but Kiev will make do with whatever it can get.