The World Wars

Beijing says 26 world leaders will attend the event in Tiananmen Square, overseen by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin will be among world leaders attending an upcoming military parade in China to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.

Kim and Putin will participate in the “Victory Day” parade in Beijing next week, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Thursday.

It will be held in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and will feature a cast of thousands and a showcase of China’s latest military technology.

The guest list also includes Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, the ministry said.

The parade coincides with the anniversary of September 3, 1945, the day that the Empire of Japan formally surrendered to Allied Forces in Tokyo.

South Korea will be represented by Woo Won-shik, the speaker of the National Assembly, while Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, will be the only Western leader in attendance.

It is unclear if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the parade.

Modi will be in China that same week to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Beijing-led security alliance, in the Chinese city of Tianjin.

Indian and Chinese relations declined sharply in 2020 over a border dispute in the Himalayas, but they have thawed recently thanks to shared economic grievances with the United States and President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

Kim and Putin are expected to take centre stage at the parade alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping.

North Korea is a treaty ally of China, and Beijing provides Pyongyang with a crucial economic lifeline in the face of international sanctions over its nuclear weapons programme.

Beijing has also come to play a similar role to Russia since Putin’s unilateral invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

China has continued to buy Russian energy exports and supply it with “dual use” technology, electronics and parts that can be used for civilian but also military purposes.

Xi and Putin signed a “no limits partnership” in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, while North Korea and Russia have also grown closer since the start of the war, with Pyongyang sending munitions and even soldiers to resupply Russian forces in their battle against Ukraine.

Putin last visited China in 2024, while Kim last visited in 2019.

Chinese military to showcase advanced fighter planes, missile systems on 80th anniversary of end of World War II.

China will stage a massive military parade next month in the heart of Beijing to commemorate 80 years since the end of World War II, and to showcase new Chinese weaponry that will be “displayed to the outside world for the first time”, state media report.

Hundreds of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, including fighter jets and bombers as well as ground forces with the latest military equipment, will be featured in the parade, Chinese military officials said at a news conference on Wednesday.

China’s official Xinhua news agency said the military parade and “joint armament formations… will be organised in a manner reflecting their functions in real combat”, and will include air, land and sea combat groups.

“The military parade will feature new fourth-generation equipment as the core, including advanced tanks, carrier-based aircraft and fighter jets, organised into operational modules to demonstrate Chinese military’s system-based combat capability,” China’s state-affiliated Global Times media outlet reported.

“All the weaponry and equipment on display in this military parade are domestically produced active-duty main battle equipment. This event showcases a concentrated display of the new generation of weaponry and equipment of the Chinese military,” the Global Times added.

The September 3 event will be the second parade since 2015 to mark the formal surrender of Japanese forces in 1945.

Foreign military attaches and security analysts told the Reuters news agency that they were expecting China’s military to display a host of new weaponry and equipment at the parade, including military trucks fitted with devices to take out drones, new tanks and early warning aircraft to protect China’s aircraft carriers.

The United States and its allies will be closely watching the display of military might, particularly for China’s expanding arsenal of missiles, especially antiship missile systems and weapons with hypersonic capabilities.

The “Victory Day” parade, involving 45 contingents of troops, will take about 70 minutes to file past President President Xi Jinping in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The Chinese leader will be accompanied by a number of invited foreign leaders and dignitaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, who also attended the last anniversary parade in 2015.

Chinese authorities have stepped up security in downtown Beijing since early August, when the first large-scale parade rehearsal was held, setting up checkpoints, diverting road traffic and shutting shopping malls and office buildings.

Nagasaki’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral was rebuilt in 1959 after being almost completely destroyed in the explosion.

Twin cathedral bells will ring in unison in Nagasaki for the first time in 80 years, as the Japanese city commemorates the moment the United States decimated it with an atomic bomb eight decades ago.

Crowds are set to gather at Nagasaki’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral on Saturday morning, as the church’s two bells will ring together for the first time since 1945.

The US dropped an atomic bomb on the southwestern port city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, at 11:02am local time, three days after it dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima.

About 74,000 people were killed in Nagasaki, while 140,000 were killed in Hiroshima.

On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II.

The church in Nagasaki, widely known as Urakami Cathedral, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous atomic explosion, the hypocentre of which was just a few hundred metres from the religious building. Only one of two church bells was recovered from the rubble.

But, funded by Catholics in the US, a new second bell has been constructed and restored to the tower. It will chime on Saturday for the first time in 80 years at the exact moment the bomb was dropped.

Nearly 100 countries are set to attend this year’s commemorations in Nagasaki.

Among the participants will be a representative from Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Israel, whose ambassador to Japan was not invited to the memorial last year over the country’s war on Gaza, is also expected to attend.

“We wanted participants to come and witness directly the reality of the catastrophe that a nuclear weapon can cause,” a Nagasaki official said last week.

Spearheading the fundraising campaign for the new church bell was James Nolan – a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the US’s first nuclear weapons.

While doing research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the cathedral’s two bells ring together once again.

Inspired, Nolan embarked on a yearlong series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the US, primarily in churches, ultimately raising approximately $125,000 to fund a new bell. It was unveiled in Nagasaki earlier this year.

“The reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears,” Nolan said.

The cathedral’s chief priest, Kenichi Yamamura, said the bell’s restoration “shows the greatness of humanity”.

“It’s not about forgetting the wounds of the past but recognising them and taking action to repair and rebuild, and in doing so, working together for peace,” Yamamura told the AFP news agency.

Hiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, warns of the dangers of rising global militarism.

Thousands of people have gathered in Hiroshima to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the world’s first wartime use of a nuclear bomb – as survivors, officials and representatives from 120 countries and territories marked the milestone with renewed calls for disarmament.

The western Japanese city was flattened on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped a uranium bomb, codenamed Little Boy. Roughly 78,000 people were killed instantly. Tens of thousands more would die by the end of the year due to burns and radiation exposure.

The attack on Hiroshima, followed three days later by a plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, led to Japan’s surrender on August 15 and the end of the second world war. Hiroshima had been chosen as a target partly because its surrounding mountains were believed by US planners to amplify the bomb’s force.

At Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park on Wednesday, where the bomb detonated almost directly overhead eight decades ago, delegates from a record number of international countries and regions attended the annual memorial.

Reporting from the park, Al Jazeera’s Fadi Salameh said the ceremony unfolded in a similar sequence to those of previous years.

“The ceremony procedure is almost the same throughout the years I’ve been covering it,” Salameh said. “It starts at eight o’clock with the children and people offering flowers and then water to represent helping the victims who survived the atomic bombing at that time.

“Then at exactly 8:15… a moment of silence. After that, the mayor of Hiroshima reads out the declaration of peace in which they call for the abolition of nuclear weapons around the world,” he added.

Schoolchildren from across Japan participated in the “Promise of Peace” – reading statements of hope and remembrance. This year’s ceremony also included a message from the representative of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, urging global peace.

Hiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, warned of the dangers of rising global militarism, criticising world leaders who argue that nuclear weapons are necessary for national security.

“Among the world’s political leaders, there is a growing belief that possessing nuclear weapons is unavoidable in order to protect their own countries,” he said, noting that the United States and Russia still hold 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads.

“This situation not only nullifies the lessons the international community has learned from the tragic history of the past, but also seriously undermines the frameworks that have been built for peace-building,” he said.

“To all the leaders around the world: please visit Hiroshima and witness for yourselves the reality of the atomic bombing.”

Many attendees echoed that call. “It feels more and more like history is repeating itself,” 71-year-old Yoshikazu Horie told the Reuters news agency. “Terrible things are happening in Europe … Even in Japan, in Asia, it’s going the same way – it’s very scary. I’ve got grandchildren and I want peace so they can live their lives happily.”

Survivors of the bombings – known as hibakusha – once faced discrimination over unfounded fears of disease and genetic effects. Their numbers have fallen below 100,000 for the first time this year.

Japan maintains a stated commitment to nuclear disarmament, but remains outside the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Nadiya escaped the rapists and killers only because her father hid her in a haystack amidst the shooting, shouting and bloodshed that took place 82 years ago.

“He covered me with hay and told me not to get out no matter what,” the 94-year-old woman told Al Jazeera – and asked to withhold her last name and personal details.

On July 11, 1943, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA), a nationalist paramilitary group armed with axes, knives and guns, stormed Nadiya’s village on the Polish-Ukrainian border, killing ethnic Polish men and raping women.

“They also killed anyone who tried to protect the Poles,” Nadiya said.

The nonagenarian is frail and doesn’t go out much, but her face, framed by milky white hair, lights up when she recalls the names and birthdays of her grand- and great-grandchildren.

She also remembers the names of her neighbours who were killed or forced to flee to Poland, even though her parents never spoke about the attack, now known as the Volyn massacre.

“The Soviets forbade it,” Nadiya said, noting how Moscow demonised the UIA, which kept fighting the Soviets until the early 1950s.

Nadiya said her account may enrage today’s Ukrainian nationalists who lionise fighters of the UIA for having championed freedom from Moscow during World War II.

After Communist purges, violent atheism, forced collectivisation and a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, the UIA leaders chose what they thought was the lesser of two evils. They sided with Nazi Germany, which invaded the USSR in 1941.

In the end, though, the Nazis refused to carve out an independent Ukraine and threw one of the UIA’s leaders, Stepan Bandera, into a concentration camp.

But another UIA leader, Roman Shukhevych, was accused of playing a role in the Holocaust – and in the mass killings of ethnic Poles in what is now the western Ukrainian region of Volyn and adjacent areas in 1943.

Genocide?

Up to 100,000 civilian Poles, including women and children, were stabbed, axed, beaten or burned to death during the Volyn massacre, according to survivors, Polish historians and officials who consider it a “genocide”.

“What’s horrifying isn’t the numbers but the way the murders were carried out,” Robert Derevenda of the Polish Institute of National Memory told Polskie Radio on July 11.

This year, the Polish parliament decreed July 11 as “The Volyn Massacre Day” in remembrance of the 1943 killings.

“A martyr’s death for just being Polish deserves to be commemorated,” the bill said.

“From Poland’s viewpoint, yes, this is a tragedy of the Polish people, and Poland is fully entitled to commemorate it,” Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.

However, rightist Polish politicians may use the day to promote anti-Ukrainian narratives, and a harsh response from Kyiv may further trigger tensions, he said.

“All of these processes ideally should be a matter of discussion among historians, not politicians,” he added.

Ukrainian politicians and historians, meanwhile, call the Volyn massacre a “tragedy”. They cite a lower death toll and accuse the Polish army of the reciprocal killing of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

In post-Soviet Ukraine, UIA leaders Bandera and Shukhevych have often been hailed as national heroes, and hundreds of streets, city squares and other landmarks are named after them.

Evolving views and politics

“[The USSR] branded ‘Banderite’ any proponent of Ukraine’s independence or even any average person who stood for the legitimacy of public representation of Ukrainian culture,” Kyiv-based human rights advocate Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.

The demonisation backfired when many advocates of Ukraine’s independence began to sympathise with Bandera and the UIA, “turning a blind eye to their radicalism, xenophobia and political violence”, he said.

In the 2000s, anti-Russian Ukrainian leaders began to celebrate the UIA, despite objections from many Ukrainians, especially in the eastern and southern regions.

These days, the UIA is seen through a somewhat myopic prism of Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, according to Likhachyov.

Ukraine’s political establishment sees the Volyn massacre and armed skirmishes between Ukrainians and Poles as only “a war related to the Ukrainians’ ‘fight for their land’”, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at Bremen University in Germany.

“And during a war, they say, anything happens, and a village, where the majority is on the enemy’s side, is considered a ‘legitimate target’,” he explained.

Many right-leaning Ukrainian youngsters “fully accepted” Bandera’s radicalism and the cult of militant nationalism, he said.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, thousands of far-right nationalists rallied throughout Ukraine to commemorate Bandera’s January 1 birthday.

“Bandera is our father, Ukraine is our mother,” they chanted.

Within hours, the Polish and Israeli embassies issued declarations in protest, reminding them of the UIA’s role in the Holocaust and the Volyn massacre.

Far-right activists began volunteering to fight Moscow-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine in 2014 and enlisted in droves in 2022.

“In the situational threat to [Ukraine’s] very existence, there’s no room for reflection and self-analysis,” rights advocate Likhachyov said.

Warsaw, meanwhile, will keep using the Volyn massacre to make demands for concessions while threatening to oppose Ukraine’s integration into the European Union, he said.

As for Moscow, it “traditionally plays” the dispute to sow discord between Kyiv and Warsaw, analyst Tyshkevych said, and to accuse Ukrainian leaders of “neo-Nazi” proclivities.

Is reconciliation possible?

Today, memories of the Volyn massacre remain deeply contested. For many Ukrainians, the UIA’s image as freedom fighters has been bolstered by Russia’s 2022 invasion, somewhat pushing aside reflection on the group’s role in the World War II atrocities.

For Poland, commemoration of the massacre has become a marker of national trauma and, at times, a point of leverage in political disputes with Ukraine.

In April, Polish experts began exhuming the remnants of the Volyn massacre victims in the western Ukrainian village of Puzhniky after Kyiv lifted a seven-year moratorium on such exhumations. Some believe this may be a first step in overcoming the tensions over the Volyn massacre.

Reconciliation, historians say, won’t come easily.

“The way to reconciliation is often painful and requires people to accept historical realities they’re uncomfortable with,” Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog, told Al Jazeera.

“Both [Poland and Ukraine] are modern European democracies that  can handle an objective investigation of past atrocities in ways that a country like Russia unfortunately can not,” he said.