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The article below first published by GR in November 2021 focuses on the hostilities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

A week into their 1941 invasion, the Germans had already advanced more than halfway to Moscow and by doing so they annihilated the Red Army divisions located close to the Nazi-Soviet border.

Stalin himself was left bewildered when he learnt from his commanders in late June 1941 of the scale of the German advances, and it’s very likely at this point that the Soviet leader feared the USSR was on its way to being comprehensively defeated.

Despite their losses the Red Army still had a huge amount of military equipment and industrial resources. Soviet troops could also withdraw into the vastness of their country in order to avoid total destruction, a luxury which the French did not have in 1940. The German high command, moreover, admitted they had underestimated the Soviet military.

Shane Quinn, Global Research, March 10, 2026

The USSR’s hierarchy was caught unprepared, and unnecessarily so, when Nazi Germany invaded their country eight decades ago on 22 June 1941, in a military offensive titled Operation Barbarossa. It was named afterKing Frederick Barbarossa, a red-bearded Prussian emperor who in the 12th century had waged war against the Slavs.

On the sixth day of the attack, 27 June 1941, German Army Group Center had already reached Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus. Amazingly it meant, at this very early stage, that the Germans were closer to Moscow than Berlin: as the crow flies, the Wehrmacht was now 430 miles from the Russian capital as opposed to 590 miles from the German capital.

After a week of fighting, the Soviets had lost around 600,000 troops and thousands of their aircraft had been destroyed, the majority of them on the ground. When on 27 June the Soviet commanders,Georgy Zhukov and Semyon Timoshenko, showedJoseph Stalinon operational maps that the Germans had advanced on Minsk, he was visiblyshockedby the magnitude of the disaster.

Should Stalin have been so surprised, considering the unprecedented rapidity the year before at which the Germans had blazed through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg?

Source: Global Research