What Putin doesn’t want to consider is that the Soviet Union didn’t defeat Nazi Germany. Like the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union withstood Nazi Germany. This was especially true at Stalingrad, where the Nazis AND the Soviets each lost about 1.0 million soldiers. Neither the Soviets nor the British might have withstood the Nazis without the US Lend Lease program, which provided food, trucks, and weapons to UK and USSR.

My father drove and maintained some of those Chevy trucks and Jeeps. He would think Putin is an idiot, a dangerous idiot, who apparently doesn’t really know or or understand 20th Century Russian history. But just like some in America don’t want to teach American history, teaching instead some sanitized pablum, it seems that they didn’t teach Russian history in Soviet schools.

America sent $11.3 billion, worth $180 billion today, of arms and equipment to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 – starting before we entered the war – in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy — bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”

A co-founder of Popular Logistics, I hold an MBA in “Managing for Sustainability” from Marlboro College and a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology from the City University of New York  College of Staten Island. Available as a speaker and consultant, I can be reached at “Popular Logistics . com” as “L Furman.”