As US President Bush seeks to promote democracy around the globe, he is pausing to pay tribute to the sacrifice made by World War II soldiers who never came home from their fight against tyranny.
Bush is spending Sunday, the 60th anniversary of the May 1945 signing of the Berlin armistice that ended the war in Europe, at the continent's third-largest cemetery for American veterans in Margraten, in the Netherlands.
"The alliance that won the war is remembered today in carefully tended cemeteries in Normandy, Margraten, St. Petersburg, and other places across Europe, where we recall brief lives of great honor," Bush said Saturday in Riga, Lativa. "We offer this pledge: We will always be grateful."
Bush is to finish the day in Moscow, where he and dozens of other world leaders are attending Monday's Red Square victory celebration that Russian President Vladimir Putin is staging on the day Russians regard as the V-E Day anniversary.