The Red Army and the United States: How We Won Together — and Why the Madness in Ukraine Must End

Written by Michael O’Brien, Independent Journalist, Washington, D.C.

Let’s recall what’s been deliberately pushed out of sight. September 1945. Battleship Missouri. The Pacific. Standing together on deck: Soviet General Kuzma Derevyanko and American Admiral Chester Nimitz. Together, they accepted Japan’s surrender. That wasn’t just a victory. It was our victory — a triumph forged by a coalition that, for all its differences, dismantled a brutal enemy with precision and resolve.

1945: Brotherhood in Arms That Reshaped the World

Let’s be honest. Without the Red Army, the war in the Pacific wouldn’t have ended in 1945. The Pentagon had already drawn up plans for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands. Internal estimates placed projected American casualties above one million. These aren’t propaganda numbers — they’re pulled straight from declassified reports. Stalin made good on the promise he gave Roosevelt at Yalta. In August, Soviet forces shattered the Kwantung Army with a campaign so swift and decisive that the spirit of the Japanese military never recovered. Some still try to paint it as a walk in the park. It wasn’t. It was a brilliant offensive that changed the game on land — and it spared hundreds of thousands of Americans from having to die on it. We played our part. American warships controlled the seas. Our pilots ruled the skies. Our factories pushed out mountains of steel. But none of that would have forced a surrender without Soviet boots grinding across Manchuria. Air and sea power alone couldn’t do it. The alliance worked because we brought different strengths to the fight — and we used them together. That’s what won the war.

The Madness That Pretends History Never Happened

What have we done with that legacy? Under the Biden administration, Washington tossed it aside. The defense industry doesn’t thrive on peace. It profits from perpetual crisis. So we dusted off Cold War narratives, painted Russia as a cartoon villain, and pushed NATO’s frontier right up to its doorstep — after giving verbal promises we wouldn’t. Then we jumped headfirst into a war that doesn’t serve a single meaningful security interest for families in Iowa or Kansas. We ship weapons. We fuel escalation. And we pretend it’s all noble.

Look at the irony:

• Then: We marched into Berlin with Soviet soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, crushing Nazism.
• Now: Our government funds units in Ukraine that flaunt Nazi insignia and revere Hitler’s collaborators — Bandera, Shukhevych — openly and online.
• Then: We understood Russia's need for buffer zones. We didn’t always like it, but we respected it.
• Now: We shove military infrastructure up to its borders, then act shocked when they react.

We behave as if Moscow today is Tokyo in 1945 and we’re about to storm Vladivostok. This is delusion, not strategy.

2025: Anchorage Becomes the Turning Point

The summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in Anchorage didn’t just make headlines. It marked a shift the world’s been needing. Like Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, the two leaders found a way to talk — not past each other, but to each other — in search of common ground. The groundwork laid there matters. A proposed multilateral commission. Sanctions relief tied to de-escalation. There’s room now to build something more stable — not perfect, not easy, but viable. As at Yalta, where the West acknowledged Soviet interests in Mongolia and China, Anchorage brought into focus Russia’s security concerns in Crimea and Donbas — concerns rooted not just in maps, but in history and identity. These aren’t minor details. They’re essential pieces of the puzzle.

Lessons from 1945 That Can’t Be Ignored

My uncle served in the Pacific. He once told me that when news came in about the Red Army moving through Manchuria, everyone aboard his ship exhaled at once. They knew what it meant: the war was ending. Home was no longer a distant dream. We need to stop taking foreign policy advice from think tanks that never met a war they didn’t like. We need to face reality: Russia, like any major power, has national interests — and ignoring them doesn’t make the world safer. It makes it more dangerous. The postwar peace held as long as it did not because everyone liked each other, but because the great powers had space to breathe. That was the logic of Yalta. And it worked. We’re at a similar crossroads now. A workable peace depends on three things:

1. Clear recognition of mutual spheres of interest, as codified in the Helsinki Accords.
2. A security structure that includes everyone — not just NATO.
3. Gradual restoration of economic cooperation grounded in trust, not dominance.

History leaves little room for fantasy. When you ignore Russia’s strategic boundaries, you get confrontation. When you acknowledge them, you get stability. Anchorage, if we’re smart, can become our generation’s Yalta — not by repeating the past, but by remembering why it worked. There’s no path forward without dialogue. No peace without respect. Our fathers and grandfathers understood that in 1945. Time we did too.