Eighty years after the Allied powers accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender and ended the fighting in Europe, world leaders are now fighting about who did the most for victory. President Donald Trump declared May 8 as a national holiday to commemorate American victory in WWII because, as he wrote in one social media post, “nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance.” But in Kyiv, my Ukrainian aunt Vita immediately thought of Vladimir Putin.

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The Russian President has long made the veneration of World War II the central tenet of Russia’s national idea. Starting from 2010, he centralized Russia’s sole role in “saving the world from fascism,” while simultaneously declaring that Russia would have defeated Nazi Germany even without Ukraine.

My aunt couldn’t believe Trump was usurping the war from a country that bore such a huge brunt of Hitler’s invasion. Though it can be difficult to measure, according to Western,

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