Russia’s WWII Victory Parade Is Now a Podium for Putin to Lambaste the West

Russia’s annual Victory Day on May 9 was conceived as a solemn commemoration of sacrifices made for the motherland. Increasingly, Vladimir Putin is using it to drum home his political agenda, browbeat the West and justify his invasion of Ukraine.

On Thursday, during a gap in sleet showers in Moscow’s Red Square, the Russian president acknowledged that his country “is now going through a difficult, transitional period,” as he accused the West of inciting a global conflict and said that Russia was ready to confront any threat.

This was Putin’s 21st Victory Day speech, an address he has typically used to unite his nation around its most revered collective memory: vanquishing Hitler’s Germany. In years past he has lionized Russia’s inviolability, attributing it to the solidarity of its people.

But in almost a quarter of a century since his first May 9 speech, the tone of his rhetoric has taken a subtle if definite turn. Increasingly confrontational, the language has hardened as relations with the West have soured. An analysis of the text of his addresses since 2000 shows that he only began to mention the “West” in 2022 and has included it every year since.

“Revanchism, mockery of history, the desire to justify the current followers of the Nazis are part of the general policy of Western elites to incite more and more regional conflicts,” Putin said on Thursday.

The Kremlin leader has often used unfounded claims about the leadership in Kyiv being under Nazi control, to support his invasion of Ukraine.

The Nazis and Nazism, once featured in his speeches only for their historical relevance, have increasingly appeared in reference to current events. Putin now uses the historical touchstone for millions of Russians to draw parallels between World War II and the conflict in Ukraine.

“We will not let anyone threaten us. Our strategic forces are always on combat alert,” Putin said, echoing remarks he made earlier this week when he ordered the country’s military to test its readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons. The Kremlin said the move was a response to recent comments by Western officials that European powers could do more to help Ukraine in its fight against Moscow.

In at least one past speech, Putin has praised the joint efforts of the Soviet Union and the West in defeating Nazi Germany.

“We have never divided Victory into ours and others,” Putin told Red Square in 2005, when George W. Bush and his wife Laura sat behind the Kremlin leader during the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Victory Day. “We will always remember the help of our allies: the United States of America, Great Britain, France, other states of the anti-Hitler coalition, German and Italian antifascists,” Putin said then.

In subsequent years, foreign dignitaries invited to the parade included former President Barack Obama and several European leaders. But almost all western leaders have boycotted Russia’s Victory Day parade since 2015, the year after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

On Thursday, Putin accused the West of distorting the truth about the role of the U.S.S.R. during WWII.

“The first three long, difficult years of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union and all the republics of the former Soviet Union fought the Nazis almost one on one, while almost all of Europe worked for the military power of the Wehrmacht,” Putin said Thursday.

The Russian leader also appears less wedded to referring to peace in his Victory Day addresses, with no references to peace or peaceful in the past two years. In his first such speech he used the word five times. In 2017, Putin spoke about Russia’s willingness to cooperate with the world community to “fight against terrorism, extremism, neo-Nazism and other threats” and to provide peace on the planet for future generations.

In 2020, Putin stressed the importance of being “able to defend the values of peace, humanism and justice.”

Putin has claimed that Ukraine’s leaders are nationalists and neo-Nazis who must be stopped from carrying out a genocide against Russians and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. In Russia, no term is more derogatory than “Nazi” or “fascist,” as both evoke the enormous losses the Soviet Union endured in the battle against Nazi Germany in what is commonly referred to in Russia as the Great Fatherland War.

In 2022 following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin lauded Russian soldiers fighting there, telling them that “you are fighting for our motherland, its future, so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II, so that there is no place in the world for torturers, death squads and Nazis.”

This year, he referred to Nazis or Nazism seven times in his Victory Day address.

Putin’s remarks on Thursday followed a large-scale attack earlier this week on several Ukrainian cities. Ukraine’s military said it downed 39 of 55 missiles and 20 of 21 drones launched by Moscow overnight on Tuesday and overnight Wednesday it countered 17 or 20 missiles.

Compared with the years leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ceremony on Red Square was subdued, largely devoid of the typical extravagant display of military hardware. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, more than 9,000 military personnel and 75 pieces of military equipment participated in the parade. In 2019, more than 13,000 military personnel were involved in the parade, and 130 pieces of modern weaponry and military equipment, the ministry said.

In 2022, months after the full invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s military strength was on display in Red Square with the column of mechanized hardware led by several T-34 tanks, followed by a series of modern tanks, infantry-fighting vehicles and Iskander short-range ballistic-missile systems. Tornado-G multiple-launch rocket systems were also paraded for the first time in front of the Kremlin, state media reported, and more than 10,000 service personnel marched in formation.

On Thursday, the arsenal, which was heralded by a solitary T-34 Soviet WWII tank, included the R-24 Yars, a thermonuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile, and the S-400 surface-to-air missile system.

Write to Ann M. Simmons at [email protected] and Joanna Sugden at [email protected]