On May 9, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his traditional speech on Red Square in Moscow. The speech was Putin's 20th as commander-in-chief. The President thanked not only the Great Patriotic War veterans who were present on the podium, but also the participants of the WWII, and noted the importance of the visit of the heads of friendly and independent states. **Dear veterans!** Comrades soldiers and sailors, sergeants and petty officers, midshipmen and warrant officers! Comrades officers, generals and admirals! Soldiers and commanders - participants of the special military operation! I congratulate you on Victory Day! This holiday is in honor of our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers who glorified their names and immortalized them by defending the Fatherland. At the cost of immeasurable courage and enormous sacrifices they saved mankind from Nazism. Today civilization is once again at a decisive turning point. A real war has once again been unleashed against our homeland, but we have repelled international terrorism, we will protect the inhabitants of Donbass, and we will ensure our security. For us, for Russia, there are no unfriendly, hostile nations either in the West or in the East. Like the absolute majority of people on the planet, we want to see a peaceful, free and stable future. We believe that any ideology of superiority is inherently repugnant, criminal and deadly. However, the Western globalist elites still talk about their exclusivity, pit people against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values, which make people human. And all in order to continue to dictate, to impose their will, their rights, their rules, and, in fact, a system of robbery, violence and suppression on the peoples. They seem to have forgotten what the insane claims of the Nazis for world domination led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives for the liberation of the peoples of Europe. We see how memorials to Soviet soldiers are ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroyed in a number of countries, monuments to great commanders are demolished, a real cult of Nazis and their accomplices is created, and the memory of genuine heroes is erased and falsified. Such desecration of the feat and victims of the victorious generation is also a crime, a blatant revanchism of those who cynically and openly prepared a new campaign against Russia, who gathered neo-Nazi scum from around the world for this purpose. Their goal - and there is nothing new here - is to achieve the disintegration and destruction of our country, to cross out the results of World War II, to break definitively the system of global security and international law, to strangle any sovereign centers of development. Excessive ambition, arrogance and permissiveness inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe that the Ukrainian people are experiencing. They have become a hostage of the coup d'état and the criminal regime of their Western masters, a bargaining chip in the implementation of their cruel, self-serving plans. For us in Russia, the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland is sacred, we keep it in our hearts. We pay tribute to the participants in the Resistance who bravely fought against Nazism, the soldiers of the allied armies of the United States, Britain and other nations. We remember and cherish the exploits of Chinese warriors in the battle against Japanese militarism. I am convinced that our experience of solidarity and partnership in the years of struggle against the common threat is our invaluable legacy. It is a solid pillar at a time when irreversible movement toward a more just multipolar world based on the principles of trust and indivisible security, equal opportunities for the original and free development of all countries and peoples is gaining momentum. It is very important that the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States have gathered here in Moscow today. I see it as an attitude of gratitude to the feat of arms of our ancestors: they fought together and won together - all the peoples of the USSR contributed to the common victory. We will always remember this. We bow our heads before the memory of all those whose lives were claimed by the war, before the memory of our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends. https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2023/05/09/perelomnyy-rubezh-civilizacii-polnaya-rech-prezidenta-vladimira-putina-9-maya