A tumultuous year of fighting has passed since Vladimir Putin last addressed Russian soldiers on Red Square in Moscow to mark the country’s victory over the Nazis.
But the Russian leader’s Victory Day message to the nation on Tuesday was nearly identical to that of last year as he cast the war in Ukraine as an existential battle against an aggressive, Russophobic and woke west.
“Today, civilisation is again at a decisive turning point. A real war has been unleashed against us again,” Putin said as he delivered an angry yet somewhat routine speech in which he drew false parallels between today’s fight with Ukraine’s “criminal regime” and the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
Putin also recycled some of his other go-to grievances, blaming “western globalist elites” for “destroying the family” and “traditional values”.
What was left unspoken by the Russian president was the battering his army had received over the last 12 months in Ukraine, which was revealed by the scaled-down military parade that followed his speech.
In the run-up to the celebrations, the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, pledged that the parade would feature 125 military vehicles and 10,000 personnel. But on the day of the parade, 8,000 soldiers marched, the lowest figure since 2008, while analysts counted only 51 military vehicles on Red Square, less than half the number of the year before. The only tank spotted was a second world war T-34 awkwardly leading the usually much-anticipated vehicular part of the event.
“The Kremlin tried to hide the severe damage to the army but it was just too much to hide,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.
Like last year, the traditional flypast was cancelled in both Moscow and St Petersburg, but while the authorities previously blamed the weather conditions, there was no official comment this time around. Instead, present were police sporting portable anti-drone weapons, a reminder of last week’s dramatic drone attack on the Kremlin, just steps away from today’s celebration.
For all its visual shortcomings, the parade did present the Kremlin with an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to court foreign visitors in the face of western isolation. This year, the heads of the five central Asian states sat alongside Putin, with the Kremlin still the region’s closest security partner.
But beyond this symbolic showing, the Kremlin on the day was unable to present its population with a tangible military victory in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said Russia had recently intensified shelling of the besieged city of Bakhmut, hoping to take it by Tuesday. But Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had failed to do so as Kyiv continued its preparations for its own counteroffensive.
Instead, the Russian military leadership was treated to a new tirade by the Wagner mercenary group head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who on Tuesday blamed the defence ministry for the abandonment of positions in Bakhmut.
Prigozhin renewed his threats to abandon the city after he said he had received only 10% of the ammunition promised to him. “Happy Victory Day to all of our grandfathers, but what we are celebrating is a big question,” Prigozhin said, warning that Moscow was not prepared for a Ukrainian offensive.
“Stop fucking about on the Red Square,” he said.
