The Economist

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today, we're dedicating a special episode to Victory in Europe, or VE Day.

It's been 80 years since the formal end of war

in Europe, even if war against Japan raged on. Hitler was dead, the Nazis had surrendered,

and the Allied powers, including America and the Soviet Union, had reason to celebrate.

We're taking all this time to talk about it, not because 80 is a nice round number.

This decadeal anniversary is different from the last, from all that came before it.

Which countries are allied now?

Who promises to keep the peace in Europe and the world?

What's left of the worldview that survived for so many of those 80 years?

We'll be looking back at how the economist reported the end of the war at the time,

at what European defense looks like now,

and how Britain celebrates the anniversary today,

because each nation sees VE Day through its own lens,

its own perception of its role in the war and in history.

And as our Russia editor Arkady Ostrovsky says,

there's one country where that perception has shifted more than in any other.

Thank you. shifted more than in any other. The actual day, 80 years ago, when Soviet people learned of Nazi surrender,

was a day of extraordinary outpouring of emotions and joy and sorrow for a country that lost 27 million people

in that war. And it was completely driven by people themselves. They spontaneously came out

...