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

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 said on Wednesday.

The remarks came ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over the Nazis 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 provided its allies with combat supplies, equipment, food, and strategic raw materials.

The 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, funneling 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.

(RT.com)