NATO has said there is no plan to admit Ukraine, but that it is for Kyiv to decide whether to apply.

That expansion still rankles with Putin, who cites what he says is NATO's intention to admit Ukraine as a direct threat to Russia and one of the reasons for Russia's invasion of its neighbour on Feb. To rub salt in the wound, the Western NATO alliance was expanding into the countries of eastern Europe that had been part of the Soviet Communist military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. They were rich in nostalgic splendour, at a time when Russia's military, ravaged by post-Soviet economic upheaval, had become a shadow of its former self. Russia's first elected president, Boris Yeltsin, made Victory Day parades an annual event from 1995 onwards. 7 each year before the assembled Communist Party Politburo to mark the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The occasion for showing off modern Soviet military hardware was parades held on Red Square on Nov. May 9 was a normal working day from 1947 until 1965, when then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered a 20th anniversary parade on Red Square, featuring veterans and historical weaponry. Soviet leader Josef Stalin decreed a holiday, and the first victory parade on Red Square, featuring captured German insignia, was held on June 24, 1945. In Moscow it was already May 9, which became the Soviet Union's 'Victory Day' in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. on May 8, 1945, marked as 'Victory in Europe Day' by France, Britain and the United States. Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender came into force at 11:01 p.m. The German invasion of 1941 exploited the same weakness that had tempted French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in his failed campaign of 1812: Russia has no natural barriers to shield its western border.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, more than any other country.

Victory day in france