Years ago I came across some source online that did the math. They assessed the scale of the Allied bombing campaign on German industrial centers and quantified the impact this had on the German war machine, and concluded that the Soviets would not have won without said bombing campaign. The Western allies, in short, were a more vital player than the Soviets in deciding the outcome of the war.
This is a very blinkered and, frankly, dumb way to analyze something complex as war, and is a perfect example of bending the numbers to fit one's conclusion. If the Soviets hadn't been fighting the Germans, we have every reason to believe that the Allied campaigns would not have gone off nearly as smoothly as they had. There's simply no way to 'crunch the numbers' to account for a counterfactual like that. If the bulk of your opponent's army is off carrying out a grueling occupation far from your theater of battle, of course that makes it easier to hit their critical infrastructure. This is why two front wars often end badly for the people involved in them. To flatly quantify this is dishonest.
But putting that aside, the Soviets helped build the German war machine which they subsequently took credit for defeating. It's questionable whether Hitler would've gambled on Poland or anything after Czechoslovakia if not for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and without those conquests the manpower and economic output that was Hitler's to command would've been much smaller.
To add injury to insult, up until Operation Barbarossa the Soviets were actually paying tribute to Germany in the form of large amounts of raw materials; it's been said that the Germans waited for the last inbound shipment to arrive from Russia before they started their invasion.
I mean if we take your argument here at face value it makes the Soviets even more critical, not less, as there would have been the possibility of them continuing to support Germany. So that makes their switching sides more decisive, not less. However, the argument itself doesn't hold water because it was always a temporary alliance to buy time on both sides - Stalin always intended to stab Hitler in the back, Hitler just beat him to the punch.
But if, for the sake of argument, they did, then so what?
They fought to replace one mass murdering ideology with another. For this reason I would go so far as to say that those members of Europe's anti-Nazi resistance who were communists weren't heroes. Only those who fought to replace Nazism with something that wasn't a different variety of totalitarianism were.
Neither Chinese nor Russian soldiers were fighting to spread an ideology. Both were fighting to defend their homes from foreign invaders. That's always heroic in my book. Half of the Chinese forces weren't even communist - the Kuomintang fought alongside the communists against the Japanese.
My point wasnt whether either empire was admirable anyway. It was to express disgust that someone would rise to such a position in the EU and seem shocked that Russia and China believe this, and view it as some novel propaganda angle based in historical fiction. That is flat-out retarded. Both countries have made that conflict a central pillar of national pride for decades, since before this woman was born. She would have had to have been born under a rock to not know that, let alone to say it on a public stage while doubting the historical literacy of the general public.
