“May 9 is a great Victory Day. For over eight decades, we have been celebrating this day, remembering our fathers, grandfathers and ancestors, the generation which defended their country and rescued their motherland from destruction,” wrote Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili in his Facebook post.

According to the Speaker, Georgians contributed a lot to this war. Hundreds of thousands of Georgians fought on the front lines, while half of them returned home.

“Soviet past is our common past. It cannot be changed. It was what it was, with both the bad and the good, casualties and joy, repression and the acknowledgement of national identity.

It is the affair of historians to study this past. And we cannot accept calls or campaigns aimed at reshaping our memory, identity and rewriting history.

“This is what is put in these calls: to celebrate May 9 on May 8, that May 9 is ‘Russian,’ and May 8 is ‘European,’ that the only thing required from Georgia is to perceive the world in the ‘Russian’ or ‘European’ colors, choose one or the other.

This is a false choice, while such thinking is inadequate or destructive. A nation must be self-existent, self-determined, thoughtful, and self-reliant. A nation cannot live according to the hysteria or terror of traumatized, damaged, and identity-deprived outsiders.

That is why May 9 remains May 9, and this day is ours. We fought, we spilt blood, we fought on the history’s winner side, and we are proud of what we were, where we stood, and what we did,” Papuashvili wrote.