(Reuters) – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin signed a decree late on Tuesday renaming the airport in Volgograd as Stalingrad, as the city was known when the Soviet army defeated the Nazi German forces in the biggest battle of World War Two.
“In order to perpetuate the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, I hereby decree … to assign the historical name ‘Stalingrad’ to Volgograd International Airport,” the decree published on the Kremlin’s website said.
World War Two, in which around 22-25 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died, is known in Russia as The Great Patriotic War. For many Russians, Stalingrad conjures memories both of the war’s sacrifice and the murderous rule of dictator Josef Stalin.
Putin has often compared his invasion of Ukraine to the fight against Nazis, presenting the war to Russians as a “special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.
Ukraine – which was part of the Soviet Union and itself suffered devastation at the hands of Adolf Hitler’s forces – rejects those parallels as spurious pretexts for a war of imperial conquest.
In a fiery 2023 speech in Volgograd marking the 80th anniversary of the battle of Stalingrad, Putin lambasted Germany for helping to arm Ukraine and reiterated that he was ready to draw on Russia’s entire arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons.
Stalingrad, which was renamed Volgograd in 1961, was the bloodiest battle of the war, when the Soviet Red Army, at a cost of over 1 million casualties, broke the back of German invasion forces in 1942-43.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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