A brand new college textbook that likens Russia’s battle in Ukraine to the Soviet wrestle in opposition to the Nazis and says Russia was “pressured” to ship troops into Ukraine was offered in Moscow on Monday.
President Vladimir Putin casts the battle, which Moscow formally calls a “Particular Navy Operation”, as a troublesome however essential struggle in opposition to a Western- and NATO-backed Ukraine. He says it’s a part of a wider existential battle in opposition to a decadent West attempting to weaken and dismember Russia.
For his or her half, Ukraine and its Western allies say Russia is waging a brutal and unprovoked battle, merely to realize territory.
The three-volume “Navy Historical past of Russia” was edited by Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Putin who headed a delegation that held unsuccessful peace talks with Ukraine in 2022, within the early months of the battle, and has already co-authored Russia’s fundamental historical past textbook.
The third quantity, more likely to be dismissed by Ukraine’s management as propaganda, is designed to be taught to kids aged 15 and older.
It explains why the Kremlin believes the battle began and the way it’s being fought, highlights what it regards as incidences of battlefield heroism, and describes how the trendy Russian military is typically employs strategies utilized by the Soviet military throughout World Warfare Two.
In a chapter entitled “Professionalism, indomitability and braveness: Russian troops within the Particular Navy Operation”, the e book tells schoolchildren that Russia was “pressured” to ship its troops into Ukraine in 2022.
It says the West had for years ignored Russia’s safety issues – a reference to the eastward enlargement of the NATO navy alliance, and to what the e book described because the Western-backed toppling of a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president in 2014, which had turned Ukraine into an “aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead”.
NATO and Ukraine deny ever posing a risk to Russia.
Talking at a TASS information convention to debate the brand new e book, Ivan Basik, a navy historian affiliated with the Russian military, mentioned Western and Ukrainian actions had made the battle “inevitable”.
“A very powerful job was to elucidate to the youthful era, to schoolchildren, the pressured nature of the particular navy operation carried out by the Russian Federation,” he mentioned.
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