US material aid helped a ton but the push to inflate it's importance to the end result of the war seems never ending.
Only less than 15% of lend lease supplies had arrived a year after the last axis attempt at and advance on the eastern front. The vast majority whilst incredibly helpful arrived when the axis was already rapidly retreating.
I agree that they were incredibly brutal and rapey tho. How much of that was revenge/progression of the horrors of the eastern front idk. I'm inclined to say it was a fragment of the time but there was a ton of rape by them in the Chechnyan and Georgian conflicts as well.
1 - While Russia was the biggest component, it was the Soviet army - which included Ukraine (and led by a Georgian). So you're tarring both sides of the current war in your comment.
2 - It was a World War, tragic for all parties involved. You look at each side and they had moments of brilliance and absolute disasters. The Soviet Union (nor the UK) didn't have the luxury to sit back and scale their industry because the Axis forces were literally on their front, not separated by an Atlantic Ocean. Would the SU have won without American supplies? We don't know, but to downplay the player who was involved in the biggest military operations of the war that made D Day look like a side battle (Stalingrad, Kursk, Seelow Heights, Leningrad, Operation Bagration, search any one of those) shows a lack of historical awareness.
Edit - Adding to the above - more Civilians died in the Soviet Union than the total combined military deaths of the other Allied Powers. War is hell and shouldn't be romanticised or seen as a solution.
Okay? What does this have to do with what I said? The Russians were obviously in charge of the USSR.
> We don't know, but to downplay the player
You're misreading what I wrote. I'm not talking about the importance of their contribution, but about their general competence. Even with US supplies, the USSR took absurdly huge losses against a smaller population invader, while fighting on their own home turf. That speaks to general ineffectiveness, that they could only win through overwhelming numbers.
The most important purpose of a military is to defend their country's populace. The USSR utterly failed here. You can argue that this is because the USSR was also just less economically developed than Germany, but that doesn't exactly paint the country in a flattering light either.
> The Soviet Union (nor the UK) didn't have the luxury to sit back and scale their industry
Bullshit, they could've done it earlier. Germany went back on peace to split Poland with the USSR, any idiot could see the likelihood of eventual backstabbing. Stalin knew it was coming, he was just wrong on exactly when because he didn't believe the intel he got.
> War is hell and shouldn't be romanticised or seen as a solution.
Obviously.
You mean stalin? That's who you want us to sympathize with?
Then when you look post WW2, they were mostly just used to brutally crush a few uprisings, never really had to fight a real war until the current one.