Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski led controversial Victory in Europe Day celebrations in Gdansk yesterday in a deliberate snub to Russia.

Mr Komorowski organised the midnight event in the former stronghold of anti-communist union Solidarity as an alternative to the annual Moscow Victory Day celebration on May 9.

It was held at Westerplatte, where the opening shots of World War II were fired when the city was better known as Danzig.

Warsaw hoped to persuade heads of state to attend their event instead of the traditional parade in Red Square.

But although many Western leaders have declined to attend the Moscow celebration, they did not turn up in Gdansk yesterday either.

However, the guest list did include UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and European Union council president Donald Tusk, a Polish citizen.

US and EU leaders have been ever more keen to play down the Soviet Union’s pivotal contribution to the defeat of fascism in World War II since relations soured over the coup in Ukraine last year, which was backed by the West and Ukrainian fascists.

With the east of the country under the control of separatist forces in an on-and-off civil war and the regime in Kiev in ongoing financial crisis, they have sought to pin the blame on Russia.

Some members of the Ukrainian government have praised as freedom fighters the Banderov death squads and other nazi collaborators, who massacred Jews, Poles and other minorities during WWII.

The Polish president had said that the event would stress how the end of the war did not bring full liberation to much of eastern Europe, but instead brought decades of unwanted Soviet domination.

Following the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the 27 million Soviet citizens gave their lives — two-thirds of them civilians.

The Red Army liberated not only its own territory but that of Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and much of Germany, before encircling Berlin and forcing the nazi surrender.