Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton.

In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world.

Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists.

I'm Hannah Skoda, I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.

I'm Rana Mitter.

I'm S.T. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School,

and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.

Hannah and Rana, it's great to be with you here in Oxford today for this episode of history behind the headlines.

We'll be talking through a couple of topics as usual, kicking off with the fact we're speaking at the very end of May, which marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

And I believe there were a few things that you both wanted to explore in terms of parallels or in terms of connections to that.

Rana, do you want to kick us off?

Absolutely, because as we're speaking, it's a couple of weeks since VE Day itself, 8th of May,

1945, and then, of course, 80 years on, 2025.

And I was struck by the way that 80 years on, actually memories of World War II and of victory in Europe

are still much more bifurcated than I might have expected this far on.

And I thought in some sense there would have been more consensus.

But actually it's very clear that World War II still remains a very potent source of people imagining their identities.

And second, those

reflections or perhaps in some cases accusations that they make aren't necessarily all lined up

in the same place. So that was prompted particularly by seeing the gathering on the 9th of May,

in fact, in Red Square in Moscow,, where Vladimir Putin currently still in the midst of

a very brutal war, used the Second World War very much as an occasion to make the point

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