PRESIDENT Bush led VE-Day commemorations yesterday with a speech at a US military cemetery in the Netherlands in which he likened the fight against Nazism to the US-led War on Terror.

Sixty years after US and European troops defeated Hitler’s regime, freedom was still being spread around the world “because of the sacrifices of a new generation of men and women, as selfless and dedicated to liberty as those we honour today”, Mr Bush said.

Surrounded by white marble gravestones at the Margraten cemetery outside Maastricht, he told Dutch and US veterans: “As the 21st century unfolds, Americans and Europeans continue to work together in bringing freedom and hope to places where it has long been denied — in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon and across the broader Middle East.”

He said that the lesson from the Second World War, which claimed about half a million US lives in Europe and Asia, was that democracy brought peace.

“The world’s tyrants learnt a lesson: there is no power like the power of freedom and no soldier as strong as a soldier who fights for this freedom,” he said.

Under light rain, Mr Bush and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands laid wreaths at the cemetery, which contains the graves of 8,000 US soldiers. Gunshots rang out, a bugler played the Last Post, and military planes flew overhead.

After the ceremony Mr Bush flew to Moscow, where more than 50 world leaders gather today to pay homage to the 27 million Russians who died.

Last night, Mr Bush met President Putin at his dacha outside Moscow. Stephen Hedlay, US National Security Adviser, said that the leaders had a “straightforward talk” about Russia’s internal problems and its tensions with the Baltic countries. Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran were among other issues the two leaders discussed.

Their talks were overshadowed by a row over the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Mr Bush has raised tensions with Russia by visiting two former Soviet republics, Latvia and Georgia, and voicing his support for them against Russian domination.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are demanding an apology from Russia for the postwar occupation.

On Saturday, President Bush declared in a speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, that the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was “one of the greatest wrongs of history” and promised “we will not repeat the mistakes of other generations — appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom, in the vain pursuit of stability”.

Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, and José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, also supported the Eastern Europeans over the issue of Soviet occupation. Mr Putin insisted in a French newspaper that he would not apologise for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

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