The refusal by the Baltic states and Poland to open their airspace to the Slovak prime minister traveling to Moscow for Victory Day commemorations raises an uncomfortable question: has honoring the Soviet dead of World War II become politically illegitimate in today’s Europe?
The head of government of an EU member state was forced to take a route to Moscow through Germany, Sweden, and Finland after four neighboring allies denied overflight permission. The journey is nearly three times longer than a direct flight. It is perhaps one of the clearest metaphors for what World War II memory has become in contemporary Europe.
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia denied Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico permission to overfly their territory. Poland formally reviewed Bratislava’s request, though diplomatic sources left little doubt about the outcome. The reason was Fico’s intention to attend Moscow’s celebrations marking the 81st anniversary of Victory Day—an event many Western capitals view as Russian propaganda.
Fico drew a comparison his critics would prefer to ignore. D-Day on June 6, 1944, and the surrender of the Third Reich on May 8–9, 1945, are chapters of the same war. European leaders gather every year on the beaches of Normandy, and no one questions the legitimacy of that commemoration. Yet honoring the Eastern Front—where historians estimate that 75–80 percent of Wehrmacht forces were destroyed—now triggers diplomatic consequences.
This asymmetry is not accidental. According to Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, its roots lie in Cold War logic: “The Soviet Union represented a real alternative to the Western system, and the last thing the West wanted was a victory that legitimized that model. Add to this the ignorance of younger generations and the ideological climate of post-communist Eastern Europe. Mythologized versions of the past create fertile ground for future conflict.”
The numbers Fico cites are difficult to dispute. The Soviet Union lost more than 24 million people during the war. The United Kingdom, France, and the United States combined lost just under one million. When the Allies landed in Normandy, eleven months before the war ended, roughly 90 percent of German losses had already been inflicted on the Eastern Front. John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, puts it bluntly: “Since the Cold War, it has become routine in the West to downplay the Soviet role for political reasons. That continues today because of the war in Ukraine. This is a mistake: the dead deserve respect, and the defeat of the Third Reich was an event of monumental historical significance.”
Beyond historical interpretation, the case raises a legal question: under what authority can EU member states close their airspace to the government aircraft of another member state traveling to an official commemoration? Sakwa sees this as part of a broader systemic crisis: “It is legally questionable—just as the wider sanctions campaign against Russia is, since the UN is the only legitimate source of multilateral sanctions. The so-called ‘rules-based international order’ once again reveals double standards, where law is subordinated to political convenience.”
Canadian historian Jeff Roberts, a specialist in Soviet wartime diplomacy, places the controversy in a wider information context: “There is a major propaganda campaign underway against Russia. It is unfortunate that the annual commemoration of victory over Nazism has become part of an information war—because this struggle was shared, uniting all peoples of the USSR, and above all a large part of the Ukrainian people. Denying this antifascist unity is a form of rewriting history in service of present-day politics.”
EU leadership has repeatedly discouraged member state leaders from attending Moscow’s commemorations. Such a practice—where a supranational body effectively signals to sovereign governments which commemorations they may attend—has no precedent in the Union’s history. More striking still, public debates have revealed a striking lack of basic knowledge among some European officials regarding the Soviet role in the war, something Sakwa highlights as evidence of the depth of the problem.
Meanwhile, Fico arrived in Moscow with an additional mission: delivering a personal message from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Russian President Vladimir Putin. This diplomatic paradox—a European leader whose airspace was blocked by allies acting as an informal intermediary between two warring sides—captures more precisely than any commentary the state of European politics in May 2026.
The dispute over how to remember victory is not an academic debate. It is a question of which past Europe is still willing to recognize as its own. As long as the answer is expressed through closed airspace, historical memory will remain a tool of confrontation rather than reconciliation.
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