The D-day 80th anniversary events were really moving, especially hearing from the veterans who survived. Much has been made of Rishi Sunak’s failure to attend the international event (Furious Tories turn on Rishi Sunak over D-day commemorations snub, 9 June). I was more saddened by the repeated claim in TV programmes that D-day was the turning point of the second world war, without mention of the 27 million Soviets (including Ukrainians) who lost their lives and were ignored in this commemoration. The eastern front was crucial to defeating Hitler and the Nazi armies well before 1944. Moscow in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942, three battles for Kharkov in 1941, 1942 and 1943, the great tank battle of Kursk (1943) and the siege of Leningrad (1941 to 1944) decimated the best German troops and were, collectively, the war’s true turning points. How Erwin Rommel would have welcomed defending Normandy with just a fraction of the 152 German divisions (3 million men) that invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. I feel great sadness for all deaths, including on D-day, and wake up every morning well aware that I owe my happy life to so many courageous men and women who gave their lives or were injured. Prof Colin Green Harrow, London I vividly recall attending a meeting of Westminster city council in the first week of June 1994, as a newly elected councillor. I proposed that we all stood for a minute’s silence in tribute to those who had sacrificed so much on D-day, exactly 50 years earlier. Everyone in the packed public gallery and all the councillors on one side of the council chamber stood up immediately. The Conservative councillors on the (then) majority side of the chamber, albeit keen to hurry off to a wine-and-cheese reception for the newly appointed mayor, rose slowly to their feet. They did give me and others the regrettable impression that they felt such footling commemorative gestures to be something of a time‑consuming inconvenience. Ben Summerskill London