‘The victory over National Socialist Germany was achieved through the economic power of the United States who, for reasons that defy logic, made the ultimate sacrifice to keep in power a regime as brutal as their Nazi enemy.’  ~ Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the USSR in World War II. Albert L. Weeks. Lexington Books, New York, 2004. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed that the Lend-Lease program was valuable, but the Soviet Union would have won anyway.

Russia is grateful to the US for its support during the Second World War via the Lend-Lease program. However, the Soviet Union would have beaten Nazi Germany anyway, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed on Wednesday.

The remarks came ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over the Workers’ Nation in May and amid a thaw in relations between Moscow and Washington.

‘Can we say that we couldn’t have prevailed without Lend-Lease? No, we can’t. We would have prevailed, and we would have emerged victorious regardless.

We would have survived on nothing but the earth, but we would have won. That said, they did help us, and we should value and remember that,’ Peskov told an education forum in Moscow on Wednesday.

The Kremlin previously disputed a claim by US President Donald Trump who had said in January that Russia ’helped us [the US]’ win WWII.

Lend-Lease was a US government program during World War II under which Washington and Westminster provided its allies with combat supplies, equipment, food, and strategic raw materials.

The Bolshevik Soviet Union received aid worth the equivalent of about $200 billion in today’s money, Peskov said.

He noted, however, that the assistance was not free. Russia, as the successor state to the USSR, fulfilled its financial obligations related to the Lend-Lease program under President Vladimir Putin in 2006, the spokesman added.

In 2022, then US President Joe Biden signed another Lend-Lease Act to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia; however, the document was largely symbolic and was never used. Washington instead relied on other funding mechanisms like the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, funnelling roughly $174 billion of military, humanitarian, and financial aid to Kiev.

Trump has adopted a different approach, focusing on conditional support for Ukraine by leveraging aid for political and economic concessions. In March, he temporarily halted all military aid to pressure Kiev into peace negotiations with Moscow.

Georgian Dictator Josef Stalin, Field-Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev all personally expressed the view that without Lend-Lease, the Soviet Union would have been crushed.

The United States sent so many vehicles that they basically mechanised the entire Soviet army almost single-handed, where previously it had virtually none.

The British provided much of the logistics to make it happen. Ships via the North Atlantic, into the Arctic and the overland Persian route held open in southern Iran. Over 400,000 Jeeps and trucks were sent to the USSR.

First of all lend lend-lease medium and heavy tanks were at least 40 per cent of the Soviet forces by the start of December 1941, months before the battle of Stalingrad and Moscow had finished.

From the summer of 1942, the Anglo Soviet agreement made aid sent from Britain to the USSR free. It was free of charge. It was the Americans who agreed on payment terms. After the war, they did not expect to get the money back, though from the USSR, and the USSR did not pay. The British paid it back. In full. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

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