Being in Moscow, on May 9^th Putin’s parade, that is at Russia’s celebration of the 80^th Anniversary of 1945 victory over Nazi Germany was more in support of the current Russian war in Ukraine than the victory over Fascism or Nazism. The Kremlin says the attendance of Russian allies such as China’s President Xi Jinping, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several dozen leaders from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and Latin America shows Russia is not isolated even if Moscow’s former WW2 Western allies want to stay away! Chinese troops took part in the parade, and Mr Putin shook hands with North Korean officers, praising them for their fighting skill.  North Korean troops have helped Russia fight an incursion into its western Kursk region by Ukrainian forces seeking a bargaining chip in any peace talks. In Croatia the official celebrations of the 80. Anniversary of victory over fascism was an exclusive event marked only by former communists and their indoctrinated brood. They marked the so-called liberation of Croatia in 1945 by the communists that like to call themselves antifascists. There was no liberation of Croatia, it remained occupied by Yugoslav forces. They stay away from the 80^th Anniversary of May 1945 (onwards) genocidal murders and massacres of hundred of thousands of Croats who fought for independence, referred to Bleiburg massacres and the Way of the Cross murders of Croats. Or they pay it lip service while still celebrating the communist murderers.

This, of course does not surprise anyone who knows that communists were not and are not antifascists. Antifascists do not murder their own people to the scale of genocide, communists did. Not on any scale! Joseph Stalin, before, during and after World War Two murdered and tortured, imprisoned in labour camps, millions of Russians, manifold more than the entire Holocaust. Josip Broz Tito of communist Yugoslavia is also remembered by the outside world as being among the most terrible mass murderers of the 20^th century.

As shown by his publicity agents, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic could not last week wait in Washington to be received by Donald Trump due to his illness, and then he appeared healthy as steel at Putin’s gala parade in Moscow, thus admitting where his preferences lie  and his place is. Neither in America, which he is courting, nor in Europe, which is courting him, but in Russia, with whom he lives in an extramarital union. After curing the diplomatic illness with a few media aspirins to lower the temperature of the domestic public, Vucic served as a political aid to Vladimir Putin at a celebration that was boycotted by the honest anti-fascist world after coming out of quarantine. One war cannot be celebrated with another war, writes journalist Mirko Galic for Večernji list.

The new Pope Leo XIV. says that on May 8, 1945, “a great tragedy” ended in Europe. But the truth is that the great tragedy in parts of Europe did not end then – it continued with perhaps greater brutality against human lives. It is true that the ban on religion and the persecution of believers began, abolition of religious education and trials of priests and liquidation without trial, mass murders without trial or charges of hundreds of thousands of political opponents to communist Yugoslavia picked up immediately after the war’s end was proclaimed.

Hunting political opponents and murdering them cannot be called bringing freedom. But that is what communists of Yugoslavia, and their supporters call it.

The current week and the next will mark numerous event that observe the 80^th Anniversary of Bleiburg massacres and the Way of the Cross (Death Marches). While Moscow’s victory parade bears no reference to the many victims of the Russian communist crimes it is touching to have received the information that the 90-year old Count Nikolai Tolstoy (a descendant from those banished from Russia or murdered by the communists), based in the UK, was present at the solemn mass in the Bleiburg area, Austria, this week, for the victims of communist crimes. When referring to Tolstoy then his books The Minister and the Massacres (1986), Victims of Yalta, 1977, published as The Secret Betrayal, 1944–1947, 1978, had and have much to offer regarding the perpetrators, and their helpers, of mass murders of innocent people during and after World War Two, including the victims of Bleiburg tragedy. The English-Russian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, renowned historian and author of these books, as well as others, made a strong mark in the world with his research and his knowledge of the British repatriation of Croatians, Slovenes and Cossacks (military and civilians) on Bleiburg field in 1945. These unfortunate people had guarantees from the British that the Geneva Conventions would be honoured and that they would be protected and transported to American safe zones in Italy. They fled communism. Communism in Russia, communism in Yugoslavia and sought asylum from the West. Instead, in violation of international law, they were deliberately delivered into the hands of the Yugoslav and Russian communist butchers, who, without trial, liquidated them in mass slaughters. This perhaps may have been an even bigger tragedy for Europe than the one new Pope Leo XIV says ended on May 8^th 1945. This tragedy around denied asylums and forced reparations deserves to be marked and remembered perhaps more than any other tragedy of the time. I will play my part in respecting the victims of communist crimes and their memory and bring here more about the various events that have these two weeks marked those tragedies across the world. Ina Vukic