Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Great Patriotic War refers to the Eastern Front of the Second World War, fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany from the 22nd of June 1941 to the 9th of May 1945. For certain legal purposes the end date is extended to the 11th of May 1945 to include the conclusion of the Prague offensive. The term is used in Russia and some other post-Soviet states.
The phrase traces to the Russian resistance against Napoleon's invasion in 1812, known as the Patriotic War of 1812. The expanded form, Great Patriotic War, first appeared in 1844 and grew popular around the centenary of that conflict. After 1914 it was also briefly applied to World War I.
The term appeared in the newspaper Pravda on the 23rd of June 1941, one day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was used in the title of an article by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, a member of Pravda's editors' collegium. The comparison to the victory over Napoleon in 1812 was deliberately chosen as a morale booster.
The Order of the Patriotic War is a Soviet military decoration established on the 20th of May 1942. It was awarded for heroic deeds and gave the term Patriotic War official legal recognition during the conflict with Germany.
On the 9th of April 2015, the Ukrainian parliament replaced the term with "Second World War (1939-1945)" as part of a package of decommunization laws. Ukraine subsequently shifted its commemoration date from the 9th of May to the 8th of May, aligning with European practice, and in 2023 renamed the holiday to the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in World War II 1939-1945.
No. The term covers only the Eastern Front conflict with Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. It excludes the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940, the Soviet-Japanese War of 1945, and the Soviet occupations of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina.