Two presidents and two speeches for Victory Day: from Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv.
Both presidents talked more about the present day than the past. Both insisted their enemies today were the heirs of the Nazis, and both promised their countries would succeed in what they both said was a defensive war they had been forced to fight.
There, however, the similarities between the two addresses by Putin and Zelenskiy came to an end.
The first difference was stylistic: Putin was surrounded by the pomp and militarism of the annual Red Square parade, riffing on a topic he has been angry about for years. Zelenskiy, strolling along Kyiv’s main street and delivering a casual but impassioned speech straight into the camera, cut a very different figure, as he has since the start of the war.
But the main difference was that for most people existing beyond the reach of Russian state television, Zelenskiy’s arguments were likely to be a lot more convincing than Putin’s.
Putin has long used his 9 May speeches to draw parallels between the second world war and the present day, and this year’s speech was nothing new, simply a compilation of previous grievances that were recycled and intensified for this year, when his army is fighting a new war.
But the images from that war, seen across the world, have made Putin’s politicisation of the Soviet wartime sacrifice even less convincing.
Putin used the Victory Day podium to reel off a list of grievances against the west that seemed to describe his own regime more aptly. He made reference to “cancel culture”, complaining that so-called “traditional values” had been cancelled, despite the fact his regime has arrested people for Facebook posts and shut down numerous newspapers for calling the war in Ukraine a war, and not a “special military operation”, the officially approved euphemism.
The west was “rewriting history”, Putin complained, ignoring the fact that his regime has done more than any in Europe to quash free historical inquiry about the war years. In modern Russia, the Soviet war effort is seen as sacred, immaculate and not to be sullied by historical inquiry or archival research that might shed light on some of its darker moments.
The Russian army was fighting in Ukraine “so that there is no place in the world for butchers, murderers and Nazis”, said Putin, a particularly grim claim given the well-documented evidence of executions, rape, looting and desecration carried out by his troops.
For some years, Putin has hinted at comparisons between the modern-day US and the Nazis, bemoaning American hegemony and the “unipolar world” that followed the Soviet collapse.
Back in 2015, Putin used his Victory Day speech to say that “in the 1930s, enlightened Europe failed immediately to see the deathly threat of Nazi ideology … Seventy years later, history calls on us to be aware and alert once again. We have seen an effort to create a unipolar world, and we are seeing force-oriented thinking gain traction.”
This year Putin made the comparison more explicitly. “The United States, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, began to talk about its exclusivity, humiliating the whole world,” he said.
Over the years, Putin’s disquiet about American hegemony has resonated with many different political currents globally and is at the core of why some have admired the Russian president. This year, however, the invasion of Ukraine and occupation of parts of it has made Putin’s message harder to stomach, even for many of his fans.
One of the telegrams Putin sent on the occasion of Victory Day was a message to the people of Ukraine, wishing them “good health, success and a long life”.
Soon after the speech, air raid sirens sounded again in Kyiv.
