“With so much of the ground forces engaged in Ukraine, some regions will be forced to get creative and have military instructors and other personnel play a more prominent role to give the appearance of normality,” Massicot added. “Most of the military parades will only have conscripts marching because all the contract soldiers are in Ukraine,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation. In the cities where the parades will go ahead, experts say a close read of the celebrations is likely to show the strain and damage the war has afflicted on the military. In a separate message, Prigozhin also said his Wagner troops will leave the besieged eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on 10 May, the day after the Victory Parade takes place. To add to the worries in the Kremlin, mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin on Thursday recorded a remarkable expletive-ridden video personally blaming the top defence chiefs for losses suffered by fighters in Ukraine. Ukraine, backed by modern western weapons, will soon launch its own much anticipated counteroffensive to recapture lost territory. Western officials have estimated that more than 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in fighting in Ukraine since December alone. Moscow’s winter and spring offensive across a 160-mile arc in eastern Ukraine, which started in February, has brought the country minimal gains at staggering costs.

“This is also Putin’s chance to show to the nation that he is still strong and in control of the so-called special military operation in Ukraine,” Kolesnikov added.īut on the eve of 9 May, Russia looks far from triumphing in a war it initially expected to last a few weeks. Given this importance to the Kremlin, the parade in Moscow will go ahead, Kolesnikov said. “Putin derives his whole legitimacy from the parade, framing himself as the direct successor of the army that defeated Nazi Germany.” “For Putin, it is by far the most important event of the year,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in Moscow. The carefully orchestrated victory parades that take place across the country traditionally present the Kremlin with an opportunity to flaunt modern Russian military might. Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the 1945 endpoint of what they call the “great patriotic war”, has gradually emerged as the centrepiece of Vladimir Putin’s vision of Russian identity over his 23 years in charge. Moscow students dressed in period fashion and Soviet style uniforms perform the Victory Waltz as part of a Victory Day celebration in Moscow.

Seen by A.M. Arthur