Ahead of the May 9 Victory Day Parade in Red Square, the Russian government was evidently concerned about the possibility of a Ukrainian drone strike, particularly after several drones damaged a Kremlin dome in the early hours of May 3. After the embarrassing incident, authorities in Moscow banned drone flights, introduced a new anti-drone police force and started blocking GPS, wreaking havoc on ride-sharing apps. In the end, the parade ended with no drones in sight (although there were). People with anti-drone cannons). But Vladimir Putin and his regime didn’t need Ukrainian or guerrilla piloted drones to humiliate them on Victory Day. They did that all by themselves.
Much of the commentary following the event focused on the poverty of the shortened parade, which lasted barely 45 minutes (compared to an hour last year and an hour and 10 minutes in 2021, the last day of Victory before the start of the ‘special military’ “Operation”) and contained no planes, no shiny new missiles (although the old ones were retired) and, most notably, just a lone tank – a WWII-era T-34.
⚡️⚡️Except for the old T-34 tank, not a single tank passed Red Square in honor of the “Victory Parade” in 🇷🇺Moscow
The air portion of the parade has been canceled entirely
😁😁😁 pic.twitter.com/TwxbpHbz1s
— 🇺🇦Ukrainian Front (@front_ukrainian) May 9, 2023
Imagine the tense calculation behind that decision: by flaunting a lot of tanks, you provoke obvious questions about why those tanks aren’t being used in Ukraine. If you don’t show tanks, you look weak. So choose just one and symbolically choose one of the legendary tank models that the Red Army used to shock the Nazis – a model originally built in Ukraine.
Putin, who led this shortened procedure, looked tired and miserable. His short speech hit all the usual topics of conversation—peace-loving Russia, the perfidious West whose elites promote “Russophobia” and hate traditional family values, Ukraine as a pawn of “the criminal regime of their Western masters”—and raised an eyebrow easily read as Freud’s self-image: “Unlimited ambition, arrogance and impunity inevitably lead to tragedy.” The two heavily decorated old men who flanked Putin as he sat in the gallery, presumably representing World War II veterans, turned out to be veterans the Soviet secret police. On his right: 98-year-old Yuri Dvoikin, whose role in World War II was taking part in NKVD operations to eliminate Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas in the Lviv region of western Ukraine in 1944. On his left: retired KGB officer Gennady Zaitsev, 89, whose only “combat” experience led a team that seized a government building during the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968.
Also at Putin’s side: heads of state from seven countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the rump alliance of nine of the 22 former Soviet republics. Originally only one participation was planned, Sadyr Japarov from Kyrgyzstan; Announcements about the participation of the other heads of state came in as early as May 5, just days before the parade. There was much speculation: had the Kremlin invited the late guests at the last minute or increased the pressure on them to attend? Was it just better optics and a boost in outreach, or was there something else—like a connection between the May 3 drone strikes and the hastily planned visits of six other foreign leaders?
At least, that was the hypothesis put forward by Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov on Ukrainian television: the new guests — all men who “couldn’t refuse” Russia’s belated invitation to attend — were “human shields” designed to see to it that Kiev would not take the opportunity to take out Putin with a drone, because killing some other leaders of neighboring countries would look bad and anger Ukraine’s western partners (or gentlemen, as the Kremlin sees them).
That’s pure speculation, of course — but given the notorious paranoia of the man his many detractors know as “Bunker Grandpa,” that’s not far-fetched. In any case, Ukrainian and independent Russian journalists were enthusiastic about the idea – especially in connection with the strange moment when Putin was startled by a loud bang (actually the opening drum roll of a…) while walking across Red Square to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier appeared to be a march played by the military band) and appeared to be hiding among the foreign dignitaries. Add to that the fact that Putin’s closest ally in this group, his fellow tyrant Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, was taken to the grave in a motorized cart and skipped the post-parade celebrations, either because he was really unwell or because he wanted to minimize his attendance — and what you get is “a fiasco of spectacle,” as Russian dissident journalist Dmitry Oreshkin put it on the now-exiled independent channel Dozhd TV.
To make matters worse, much of the Victory Day spotlight was snatched from Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose latest viral video not only addressed Russia’s failures at Bakhmut (where Putin is desperate for a win as a Christmas present hoped for May 9), but also railed against Russian generals and Defense Ministry bureaucrats, but seemed to be directing toxic language at Putin himself.
This was the last chapter in a long drama in which Prigozhin accused the generals and bureaucrats of criminally preventing Wagner from getting ammunition; His previously announced deal for more ammunition and better communications with the Department of Defense had turned out to be a failure. In an instantly famous moment, Prigozhin, dressed in work overalls and standing in the field next to one of his men, made scathing remarks about a “happy grandpa” who thinks everything is fine while soldiers die needlessly. Then he concluded: “What will we do with the country, with our children, with the future of Russia and how can we win the war if it turns out to be pure coincidence, and I’m just speculating here.” This grandpa is a total asshole?” (The Russian word he actually used is the difficult-to-translate epithet “mudak,” derived from a slang term for testicles, meaning a wide range of unpleasant qualities, from stupidity and incompetence to obnoxiousness and generally bad character.)
Almost everyone in the audience assumed that “happy grandpa” was Putin. In Answer When asked by New York-based Russian-language TV station RTVI, Prigozhin named three possible “grandfathers”: Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov; former deputy defense minister for logistics and newly minted Wagner officer Mikhail Mitsintsev; and, in a weird cross-gender twist, former model and “patriotic” activist Natalia Khim, who had volunteered to help source more ammunition for Wagner. In other words, Prigozhin, the founder of the Kremlin troll factory, is also a master troll — and Putin, the only major public figure in Russia to be associated with the nickname “Grandpa,” is still the likely target of his “happy grandpa” tirade . In any case, there is no doubt that Prigozhin’s May 9 video, in which he also essentially accused the current Russian leadership of exploiting a previous generation’s victory for a pompous display of stolen bravery, was a rain of sorts (you can do that replace the word calm with the more colorful verb “Prigozhin”). could be used here) on Putin’s parade.
How seriously you take Prigozhin’s statements About everything, whether he really rebels against Putin and what his game really is are topics for another day. But for other commentators, from Russian dissidents in exile like Yulia Latynina and Stanislav Belkovsky to Ukrainians like journalist Vitaly Portnikov, the real shame of Putin’s parade was that it became a holiday celebrated by millions of Russians, Ukrainians and Ukrainians something real and good meant other people in the former Soviet Union – the end of a terrible war and a victory over a global evil – in a celebration of a de facto neo-fascist regime seemingly trying to reenact World War II by playing the bad guys. There are eerie parallels: The Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War” against the German invasion began with the bombing of Kiev on June 22, 1941. On the day of the Russian victory celebration on May 9, 2023, Russian missiles flew at Kiev (and were shot down). Today there are Ukrainians who fled the German bombing raids as little boys and girls and are now fleeing the Russian bombing raids as old men and women. Meanwhile in Russia, at the Victory Day parade in Khabarovsk, the tank leading the heavy armored column was manned by Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov, a Hero of Russia award-winner who has been accused by several former subordinates of murdering Ukrainian civilians in Having arranged Bucha last year.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Ukraine is distancing itself from May 9th, historically considered Victory Day in the USSR, Eastern Bloc countries and post-Soviet successor states, while Western Europe and the United States celebrated victory in Europe on May 8th . President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used the usual Western date to announce a bill officially moving Victory Day in Ukraine to May 8 and renaming May 9 Europe Day. In his video address on May 9, Zelenskyy, like his opponent in the Kremlin, emphasized the parallels between World War II and the current war:
The day of remembrance and the victory over National Socialism in World War II and immediately afterwards the day of Europe, Europe as a realized dream of a peaceful continent. And it is only a matter of time before we can restore a sustainable and just peace in our part of Europe, in Ukraine. It is only a matter of time before the current aggressor loses like the aggressor who lost 78 years ago, and Russian revanchism is crushed by the bravery of our warriors and the combined might of the free world.
“Joint power” is appropriate: Zelenskyy also scheduled a meeting that day with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with whom he discussed Ukraine’s defense needs and a new sanctions package against Russia; He also mentioned a new $1.2 billion United States defense package.
The Russian propagandists, already eagerly awaiting the Ukrainian offensive, did not take Victory Day well. Vladimir Solovyov sullenly remarked on his online show Solovyov Live that there wasn’t much equipment in Red Square, but he found some solace in the display of ICBMs, which he interpreted as a threat to “beat” the western enemy . (“Apparently it is no longer a question of whether [the ICBMs] will fly or not but when [they] will fly.) He also railed against apathetic Russians who don’t “pull their heads out of their fat asses” to understand the “existential threat” the country faces (true, but not in the way Solovyov presumably did intended), and against men migrants who refuse to join the army.
(All of this, incidentally, was preceded by a racist dig at White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who angered Solovyov by referring to “the victory of United States and allied forces over fascism and aggression on the continent,” according to an irate Propagandist taunted Jean-Pierre as “a woman indistinguishable from Chunga-Changa,” a stereotyped African child in a Soviet-era cartoon. Then he attacked Western “Nazis.”)
But even Solovyov’s typically blunt rant paled in comparison to her propagandist Olga Skabeeva’s May 10 broadcast on Rossiya-1, which focused on Zelenskyy’s decision to declare May 9 Europe Day. (While most of the two-hour program focused on robberies in Ukraine and NATO infidelity, Skabeeva and her guests took the time to agree that both the dismissal of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and the verdict The jury’s calls for Donald Trump to be held liable for sexual abuse to E. Jean Carroll were part of the Biden administration’s ruthless campaign to suppress and silence its internal enemies.) Toward the end, one of the panelists, the “journalist,” warned and “MP” Andrei Medvedev, threatening that Russia will not achieve full victory on May 9. The celebrations are over: “Instead there will be a gay pride parade on May 9.” It keeps coming back to that.
Within 24 hours, the Ukrainians with Wagner and regular troops pushed back the Russians at Bachmut accuse each other from running away first; There were rumors that the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive had finally begun is getting louder At pro-Russian Telegram channels; and who were guests on the latest edition of Skabeyeva’s daily show freak out about the Storm-Shadow long-range missiles that England had reportedly supplied to Ukraine.
Maybe Red Square should prepare for gays.