Russian President Vladimir Putin led the country’s anniversary celebrations for the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany today, May 9.
The celebration comes as Russian forces intensified attacks on Ukraine, in one of the most deadly conflicts to happen in Europe since World War II.
Putin has used Victory Day in recent years to needle the West from a tribune in Red Square before a parade consisting of military troops, tanks, rockets, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
This year’s parade includes a fly-past over the St Basil’s Cathedral, with supersonic fighters, strategic bombers, and, for the first time ever since the parade in 2010, the Il-80 “doomsday” command plane. This plane was designated to carry Russia’s top brass if there was a nuclear war.
Putin has repeatedly likened Russia’s war in Ukraine to the challenges faced by the Soviet Union when the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler invaded in 1941. Putin has spread disinformation that the battle against Ukraine is a battle against dangerous “Nazi”-inspired nationalists — a claim that has been debunked continuously.
In a message to the peoples of the 12 former Soviet republics, Putin said that it is their common duty to prevent the renaissance of nazism.
Ukraine and its allied nations have continuously rejected an accusation that nazism is in Ukraine, and as well as the claim that Russia is fighting to survive against an aggressive West. They said that Putin unleashed a unprovoked war in an effort to rebuild the Soviet Union.
The parade in Moscow comes two days after the country’s forces bombed a village school in eastern Ukraine, which killed about 60 people.
The governor of the region in Luhansk, Ukraine, said that about 90 were sheltering at the school in Bilohorivka. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that as a result of the Russian strike, civilians hiding at the school and sheltering from shelling were killed. Moscow has not responded to the news.
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