Russians gathered on May 9 for the annual Victory Day celebrations, a hugely symbolic commemoration of Nazism’s defeat in the second world war. Elsewhere in the world, there is general agreement that Russia’s military has so far failed to achieve the strategic territorial gains that would have allowed Vladimir Putin to declare Moscow’s war aims achieved in time for the event. And so denied the opportunity to declare his own victory in Ukraine, Putin merely repeated a version of his worn-out diatribe against Nato and the west in his speech on Mosocow’s Red Square.
But Moscow’s climb-down began long before. Having failed to take Kyiv and to force a Ukrainian surrender in the first days and weeks of the invasion, Moscow announced slightly more modest, albeit not necessarily more achievable, goals for the second stage of its aggression against Ukraine in April.
