![]() Originally, only one, Kyrgyzstan’s Sadyr Japarov, had been scheduled to attend announcements of participation by the other heads of state started to come in on May 5, just a few days before the parade. On his left: retired KGB officer Gennady Zaitsev, 89, whose only “combat” experience was at the head of a team that seized a government building during the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.Īlso at Putin’s side: heads of state from seven countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States, the rump alliance of nine of the 22 former Soviet republics. On his right: 98-year-old Yuri Dvoikin, whose role in World War II consisted of participation in NKVD operations to eliminate Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas in Western Ukraine’s Lviv region in 1944. His brief speech hit all the usual talking points-peace-loving Russia, the perfidious West whose elites promote “Russophobia” and hate traditional family values, Ukraine as a pawn of the “criminal regime of its Western masters”-and contained an eyebrow-raising line easily read as a Freudian self-own: “Boundless ambition, arrogance and impunity inevitably lead to tragedies.” The two heavily bemedaled old men who flanked Putin as he sat in the stands, presumably representing World War II vets, turned out to be veterans of the Soviet secret police. Presiding over these diminished proceedings, Putin looked tired and miserable. So you go with just one, and symbolically choose one of the legendary tank models with which the Red Army shocked the Nazis-a model built originally in Ukraine. Just imagine the strained calculation behind that decision: If you parade a lot of tanks, you provoke obvious questions about why those tanks aren’t being used in Ukraine. They did that all by themselves.Ī lot of commentary following the event has focused on the poverty of the truncated parade, which lasted barely 45 minutes (compared to an hour last year and an hour and 10 minutes in 2021, the last Victory Day before the start of the “special military operation”) and featured no airplanes, no shiny new missiles (although the old ones were trotted out), and, most remarkably, just one lonely tank-a World War II-era T-34. But Vladimir Putin and his regime didn’t need Ukrainian- or guerrilla-operated drones to humiliate them on Victory Day. In the end, the parade was completed with no drones in sight (though there were people with anti-drone guns). ![]() In the wake of the embarrassing incident, the authorities in Moscow banned drone flights, introduced a new anti-drone police unit, and started jamming GPS, causing chaos for ride-sharing apps. In the run-up to the Victory Day parade on Red Square on May 9, the Russian government was clearly nervous about the possibility of a Ukrainian drone attack, especially after a couple of drones dinged a Kremlin dome in the early morning hours of May 3.
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