MOSCOW: Russia marked the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two on Friday with a parade attended by China’s Xi Jinping amid tight security to guard against Ukrainian attacks after three years of devastating war.
President Vladimir Putin, the longest-serving Kremlin chief since Josef Stalin, stood beside Xi, several dozen other leaders and Russian veterans on a roofed tribune beside Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square as Russian troops marched past.
Putin’s defence minister, Andrei Belousov, dressed in a suit, inspected 11,000 troops - including many who have fought in Ukraine - and congratulated them on Victory Day to roars of approval.
The Ukraine war, Europe’s deadliest since World War Two, haunts this celebration. Ukraine attacked Moscow with drones for several days this week, though there were no reports of major attacks on Russia on Friday amid a 72-hour ceasefire declared by Putin.
The Kremlin says the attendance of Russian allies such as Xi, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several dozen leaders from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and Latin America shows Russia is not isolated even if Moscow’s former WW2 Western allies want to stay away. From Europe, the leaders of Serbia and Slovakia were attending.
“The victory over fascism, achieved at the cost of enormous sacrifices, has an everlasting significance,“ Putin told Xi in the Kremlin on Thursday. “The countless sacrifices made by both our peoples should never be forgotten.”
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, including many millions in Ukraine, but pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Adolf Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
For Russians - and for many of the peoples of the former Soviet Union - May 9 is the most sacred date in the calendar, and Putin, angry at what he says are attempts by the West to belittle the Soviet victory, has sought to use memories of WW2 to unite Russian society.
Chinese Communist Party historians say China’s casualties in the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War were 35 million. The Japanese occupation caused the displacement of as many as 100 million Chinese people and significant economic hardship, as well as the horrific 1937 Nanjing Massacre, during which an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 victims were killed.
Moscow and Kyiv do not publish accurate casualty numbers for the war in Ukraine, though U.S. President Donald Trump, who says he wants peace, says hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed and injured.
Moscow parade
Putin has sought to insulate Moscow from the grinding artillery and drone war being fought 600 km (370 miles) away in Ukraine, though Ukrainian drone attacks have in recent days disrupted air travel to the Russian capital.
For the first time, Russia will parade drones, the biggest technological innovation of the Ukraine war, Russian state television said.
The Kremlin said the military is doing everything it can to ensure security for the parade next to the Kremlin which Russia said was targeted in 2023 by Ukrainian drones.
There were some drone attack warnings announced overnight in some western Russian regions but no reports of attacks on Moscow, which along with the surrounding region has a population of at least 21 million.
Security is very tight in Moscow. Putin proposed a 72-hour ceasefire would run on May 8, May 9 and May 10, though Ukraine said Russia had broken the ceasefire, a claim dismissed as absurd by Moscow.
The Kremlin said military units from 13 countries, including China, will take part in the parade along with Russian troops, though it was unclear how North Korea - which has helped Russia fight in Ukraine - would be represented.
In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on allies to help it resist Russia, which now controls about a fifth of Ukraine.
“Evil cannot be appeased. It must be fought,“ Zelenskiy said, according to the Kyiv Post. He criticised Moscow’s Victory Day parade. “It will be a parade of cynicism. There is just no other way to describe it. A parade of bile and lies.”
