Brussels changed its rulebook to build unity over new Russian sanctions.Many commentators had said that the Russian leader would have wanted to declare a significant victory in Ukraine, or at least part of the country.īut not only did the quick victory that Moscow is thought to have anticipated fail to materialise, Russian forces were forced into a humiliating withdrawal from the Kyiv region and the north. Putin gave no indication of how long the war might continue, and did not mention the battle for Mariupol, where Ukrainian defenders holed up in the ruins of the Azovstal steelworks have pleaded for outside help. Pro-Kremlin commentators have openly talked of nuclear strikes on the West as the war in Ukraine has progressed. Significantly, there was no repetition of previous threats to respond with violence to Western interference. No major announcements - or threats - from Putinĭespite fears that Monday’s speech by the Russian president could mark the start of another escalation in the fighting in Ukraine, with a potential general mobilisation or a formal declaration of war, the speech passed without any major new announcements. We will not let anyone annex this victory, appropriate it," he said. "We are proud of our predecessors who, together with other peoples within the framework of the anti-Hitler coalition, defeated Nazism. Speaking before Moscow's military parade, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine would not let Russia "own the victory over Nazism" in 1945. Putin himself has been branded a "war criminal" by US President Joe Biden. Kyiv has accused Moscow of employing Nazi-style tactics in Ukraine and investigations are underway nationally and internationally into multiple allegations of war crimes and other atrocities committed by Russian forces. The assertion that Russia is acting to rid Ukraine of "Nazis", often repeated by Russian leaders, is ridiculed in the West and in Ukraine, where far-right influence is marginal at best. So that there is no place in the world for executioners, punishers and Nazis," Putin said. You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of the Second World War. “Maybe they are indeed afraid that too many mothers might come in the streets with pictures of their sons asking for accountability,” Locoman said.įor the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill."I am now addressing our Armed Forces and the Donbas volunteers. Locoman noted Russia has not updated its official death count from last year - an estimate of around 5,000 - when Western analysts have put the number killed and wounded at up to 200,000. The official reason given by the organizers of the event, a group called Immortal Regiment of Russia, was that cities bordering Ukraine could not march out in a mass crowd due to security threats, according to Russian state media TASS.Įcaterina Locoman, a senior lecturer of political science at the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, said the limitation of the Immortal Regiment march could have been born out of a desire to avoid demonstrations against the war. On Victory Day, the tradition is for Russians to march and carry pictures of those who lost their lives in the war in a procession called the Immortal Regiment - but many cities across the nation canceled the activity on Tuesday. The Soviet Union saw more than 22 million civilian and military casualties in the war. The quick, less grandiose event may also have been an attempt to dodge domestic blowback over the massive human toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine.Ī staple of Victory Day is to remember and honor those killed in World War II, which is called the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Russian RS-24 Yars ballistic missiles drive along the embankment next to the Kremlin wall after Monday’s Victory Day parade in Moscow. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Putin was trying to showcase his continued influence in Central Asia. No foreign leaders attended Victory Day celebrations in Moscow last year. and Western allies are attempting to isolate Russia, Putin invited leaders from Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to stand with him in Moscow. “Their goal - and there is nothing new about it - is to break apart and destroy our country, to make null and void the outcomes of World War II,” Putin said in the speech at the Red Square.Īnd though the U.S. Though his remarks were brief, Putin drove home propaganda messaging around Russia fighting an existential war against an oppressive, Nazi-like Western alliance. “And today I looked at the faces of veterans on the Kremlin podium and realized: they need it.” “There was a lot of controversy as to whether a parade was needed at such a time,” wrote Alexander Kots, a blogger with more than 600,000 subscribers.
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