When Vladimir Putin launched what was intended as a blitzkrieg attack on Kyiv in February, he would have assumed that annual May celebrations of the Soviet victory over nazism would merge with a more contemporary triumph. Things have not worked out that way.
The protracted troubles of the Russian army meant that Monday’s Victory Day parade of military might was smaller than usual. The usual flypast, which in honour of the current war was to feature a Z formation of MiG-29 fighters, was unexpectedly cancelled. In some Russian cities, traditional symbols had been adapted to place the years 1945 and 2022 side by side. But there has been no victory in Ukraine – from where President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gave his own Victory Day speech, rejecting the cultural appropriation of the Soviet resistance by Moscow.
The abject failure of the Kremlin’s strategy, and the humiliation inflicted on Russian forces, led to speculation that Mr Putin would use his traditional address to escalate matters still further. Thankfully, this did not happen. There were no new warnings to the west regarding Moscow’s nuclear capabilities. Nor did the speech contain a formal declaration of war, which would have allowed the mobilisation of badly needed reserve forces. Instead, Mr Putin used the occasion to shore up the home front, which has so far been kept relatively quiescent through a combination of repression and propaganda.
A by-now familiar litany of baseless assertions and distortions was deployed to justify the stalled, illegal and brutal invasion. Once again, the Russian president claimed that Kyiv was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. A preposterous continuity was asserted between the Soviet Union’s resistance to Hitler and Mr Putin’s own confrontation with Ukraine, the west and Nato. American-backed forces with historic links to the Nazis, he claimed, were planning to terrorise the Donbas and invade Crimea. Russian soldiers were defending historical territory that belonged to the motherland, “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did”.
All dismally predictable and re-hashed. But perhaps more tellingly, Mr Putin’s speech also made a rare reference to Russian casualties sustained in the conflict that he unilaterally provoked. Since March, no information has been released by Moscow on the number of troops killed, wounded or captured in Ukraine – but the figure is likely to run into the tens of thousands. Acknowledging “irreparable loss for relatives and friends”, Mr Putin announced that support would be put in place for the children of the dead and for the wounded.
Placed alongside the failure to mobilise reservists, this gesture may signal a nascent preoccupation with public morale during a war that was meant to be over. Russia’s military campaign has been profoundly unimpressive. A month after abandoning the idea of occupying Kyiv and focusing on the east, real progress remains elusive. As the conflict drags on, the effect of sanctions is expected to shrink the Russian economy by up to 12% by the end of the year, and the European Union is working towards agreement on an oil embargo.
Back home, so far, practised authoritarian methods and relentless propaganda on state media have been doing their job. Internal dissent has been ruthlessly suppressed and criminalised, and an initial burst of anti-war demonstrations was quickly quelled with more than 15,000 protesters detained. According to a survey conducted by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper – which has suspended publication in Russia in protest at censorship – Mr Putin enjoys patriotic approval ratings of over 80%. But the same poll finds deep anxiety and apprehension regarding his war. This unease is not yet a problem for the Putin regime. But as economic hardship gradually deepens and an attritional conflict drags on with no end in sight, it may yet become one.
