As a conventional military power, Russia needs to catch up, but it is already making strides. The 2015 parade featured a new-generation battle tank and new infantry combat vehicles, as well as the S-400 air defense system and the RS-24 Yars mobile intercontinental ballistic missile. The vast sums of money poured into military modernization have been turned into new weaponry. The difference between the Russian military’s haphazard performance in the 2008 Georgia war and its clockwork precision in the 2014 Crimea operation is stunning. Since then, despite a fair amount of corruption and mismanagement, Russia’s military reform has been a resounding success. It was not until seven years ago that Moscow started rebuilding it in earnest. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s conventional military might decline dramatically. Conventional Military Might ReduxĪ military parade is above all about the military. The memory of the war has become sacred, and, for most people, according to a recent poll, May 9 is as important as their own birthday. It was the shared grueling experience defending their country that shaped and formed Russia’s modern nation, and has helped keep it together, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since Soviet times, it has been the country’s true national day, overshadowing the official ones: the October Revolution Day and Russia Day in June.
“They have lost thousands.May 9 is, for the Russian people, much more than Victory Day in a war that lasted almost four years and claimed 28 million of their men and women. On Victory Day itself, Putin “can’t line up his soldiers and say they’re winning,” Soodavar said. “It speaks to Russia’s purpose in world politics.”įor Putin, he said, it was a way of communicating to the Russian people that “he is the person to lead this country through adversity, as was the case in 1945 when Russia overcame Nazism.” What will Putin do? Putin now uses his annual speech at the parade to “talk about contemporary security issues,” said Ben Soodavar, a political scientist in the war studies department at King’s College London. Mikhail Metzel / Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images President Vladimir Putin attends a flower-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2021. Writing in 2015 about his personal experiences of the war, Putin said his infant brother Viktor was killed and his parents were seriously injured during the siege of Leningrad, which lasted from 1941 to 1944 in the city now known as St. Other former Soviet nations and some Eastern European nations do likewise.įor the former Soviet Union, the victory parade that followed was “very important because it gave it the status of world power, so they were celebrating that glory,” said Thornike Gordadze, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank based in London.Īfter the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent economic hardship in Russia, Putin took office and tried to make the defeat of Nazism the country’s “founding myth to cement the population together and create a Russian identity,” Gordadze said. ET) on May 8, 1945, Russia celebrated victory on May 9 because the change in time zone meant it came early that morning for them.
Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP file Why is it so important?Īlthough Nazi Germany ended all its military operations at 23:01 Central European Time (5:01 p.m. The parade was postponed until June 24 because of the pandemic. Russian RS-24 Yars ballistic missiles roll in Red Square on Victory Day in Moscow in 2020. But as this year’s parade approaches, the military pomp and pageantry will contrast starkly with the hard-fought battles and setbacks the Russian military is reportedly experiencing in Ukraine - leaving some experts wondering how Putin will be able to present Russia’s stalled invasion as a success on Victory Day.
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