World leaders gathered in Normandy on June 6 to mark the eightieth anniversary of the Allied landings in France during World War II. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not invited to attend, but the war he unleashed more than two years ago in Ukraine cast a long shadow over commemorations.
In his official address, French President Emmanuel Macron directly referenced the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. “When we look at war coming back to our continent, when we look at people questioning the values for which we fought, when we look at those who want to change borders by force by rewriting history, let us stand with dignity and look at those who landed here. Let us have their courage,” he commented.
US President Joe Biden struck a similar note. In a speech to thousands of dignitaries and around 180 surviving veterans of the 1944 Normandy landings, Biden compared the current challenge of confronting Putin’s Russia with the threat Hitler’s Germany posed to an earlier generation. “We know the dark forces that these heroes fought eighty years ago. They never fade,” he said. “Aggression and greed, the desire to dominate and control, to change borders by force, these are perennial. The struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending.”
Referring to Putin as a “tyrant bent on domination,” Biden used the anniversary to issue a rallying cry for Western unity in the fight against Russian aggression. This was accompanied by a stark warning of the grave consequences for the future of European security if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine. “We will not walk away,” Biden declared. “Because if we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there.”
Voice of Ukraine 