After the SCO summit, held from August 31 to September 1, 2025, Beijing staged a military parade to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II. On September 4, 2025, Belarusian Radio’s First National Channel discussed the parade along with the wartime events of 80 years earlier. Vyacheslav Danilovich, doctor of historical sciences, claimed that after World War II the USSR did not seize foreign lands.
"The Soviet Union did not take any territories that had never been part of the Russian Empire, no. What happened was, essentially, the return of territories. And again, look at the United States — consider what World War II meant for them. They effectively occupied Japan."
This version of history does not hold up. The territory of the Kaliningrad region was never part of the Russian Empire. It was part of the German province of East Prussia. It became part of the USSR as a result of the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
Transcarpathian Ukraine, or Subcarpathian Rus, was part of Hungary. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these territories came under Czechoslovak control and, following the war, were incorporated into the USSR. The Bukovina region also did not belong to the Russian Empire. It was part of Austria-Hungary, which passed to Romania after the empire’s collapse. In 1940, the USSR issued an ultimatum to Romania demanding these territories for itself. That is how they became the Chernivtsi region within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Eastern Galicia is the western part of modern Ukraine: the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and part of the Ternopil regions. It had been part of Poland and the Austrian Empire. During World War I, it was briefly occupied by Russian troops but later lost. In 1939, after the joint invasion of Poland by the USSR and the Third Reich, Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
