PAS MP Mihail Druță said that it is justified to celebrate Europe Day on May 9, as the holiday of the European community and of peace, and the Day of Commemoration and Reconciliation on May 8 as the second act of surrender by Nazi Germany was signed on May 8, 1945, after 10pm. In a public debate staged by IPN, the MP stated that the ideological turmoil, including the street one, takes place because there is chaos in the people’s head. To bring clarity, several notions need to be elucidated, like World War II and the Great Patriotic War.

He noted that World War II started with an agreement between two totalitarian regimes – a Nazi one and a Communist one of Soviet type. The two agreed to divide Central and Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. The Nazi regime had its own reasons. It dreamed of changing the state of affairs established after World War I and its interests were revanchist in character. The regime from the Kremlin dreamed of restoring the state within the borders of the former Russian empire. The war started on September 1, 1939, when both of the regimes attacked Poland and divided it between them.

According to the MP, each country has a specific path in times of war and the holidays are therefore not uniform in Europe. For the Soviet Union that ignores the first stage of the war, the war started on June 22, 1941. “The USSR and Russia later claimed that the war had a patriotic, defensible character, but this is not true as they pretend to forget the first period of the war that was an aggression war for them. The countries of Western Europe that were occupied, such as the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, do not celebrate Victory Day. They celebrate the day they got rid of the Nazi occupation and mark the Liberation Day,” said Mihail Druță.

He noted that it is not right “to celebrate Victory Day” as this is actually a day of commemoration and reconciliation, homage rendered to all the victims of World War II. For Bessarabia, the war started on June 28, 1940, when it was occupied by one of the aggressors. “We were the victim of an aggressor and cannot name the aggressor “our homeland” by the old formula “Day of Victory and commemoration of heroes who died for the independence of the homeland,” said the MP.

He also said that the May 9 holiday in Russia has a different connotation, which is profoundly anti-West and profoundly militarist, not of commemoration of victims. The developments in Ukraine show that Russia started to implement its new doctrine concerning May 9 in its militarist meaning.

Mihail Druță stated that the people are now hostage to the past, to propaganda that entered the conscience of a part of the Moldovan population by different ways during tens of years. But we are also the target of current imperial propaganda that is promoted by different Russian media outlets. There are forces in Parliament that stick to the bicolor ribbon and to the name of Victory Day and do not want to condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. But when times of peace come and Russian society wakes up from this abnormal state, these Moldovan politicians will also accept the terms “commemoration and conciliation”.

According to the MP, not only some of the MPs or the government, but the whole society is obliged to place the historical truth at the forefront.

The public debate entitled “Victory Day: between reconciliation, antagonization and destabilization” was the 11th installment of IPN’s project “Impact of the Past on Confidence and Peace Building Processes” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.