On Putin’s “Victory Day,” A Warning To the West

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — It’s an unusually busy week in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been inaugurated for a fifth term, the military is rehearsing its parades for May 9 – the annual celebration of “Victory Day,” honoring the heroes of World War II – and visitors are flocking to an exhibition in Victory Park, a sprawling complex that was built to honor the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. 

The exhibition carries a blunt message from the Kremlin to the West: We’re fighting you, too. 

The Victory Park show opened to coincide with the Victory Day holiday, which successive Russian leaders have used to tout the nation’s power and military prowess. The exhibition’s centerpieces are Western armored vehicles and assorted weapons captured by the Russians in Ukraine: a British armored  vehicle with a bullet-pocked windshield; a German Leopard tank; and an American Abrams tank. Russia’s Zvezda army Telegram channel called the Victory Park show a celebration of Russia’s success “against Ukrainian militants and their Western supporters.”

“If two years ago Russian propaganda on Victory Day was focused mainly on condemning ‘Ukrainian Nazism’ and trying to portray Ukraine as a continuation of Nazi Germany, now propagandists are trying to convince the population that the entire Western world is Nazi,” Kseniya Kirillova, a Russia expert at the Jamestown Foundation, told The Cipher Brief. 

The exhibition is also the Kremlin’s latest effort to tie the current conflict to what Russians still call the “Great Patriotic War,” the long and ultimately successful struggle against Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Above a row of German armored vehicles in Victory Park – the ones captured in Ukraine – there’s a sign in Russian that reads, “History is repeating itself.”

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special operation” against Ukraine in February 2022, he has tried to link the conflict with the campaign against Hitler. On the night he ordered the invasion, Putin said it was necessary to remove the “Nazi regime” in Kyiv, and he has referred repeatedly to the need to “denazify” Ukraine. Russians sacrificed more than any nation in World War II, in terms of military and civilian losses, in the battles that followed Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia. Any association of that war with the current campaign suits the Kremlin’s current propaganda aims.

“Our victory is inevitable!” one of the posters at the Victory Park exhibition says – and while that’s a highly debatable statement, it’s safe to say that for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, Putin actually has something to celebrate on “Victory Day.” 

No ordinary holiday

It’s hard to overstate the symbolic power of May 9 in Russia – or the importance for Putin and the Kremlin to have military success to boast about on Victory Day.

Recent reports suggest Russia’s leaders ordered the military to capture Chasiv Yar, a small but strategically important city in the Donetsk region, in time for the May 9 celebrations. And Ukraine’s deputy head of intelligence, Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, told the Economist this week that a Russian order has gone out to “take something” in time for Victory Day. 

Two years ago, intelligence intercepts described a different order for Victory Day – that “the war must be ended by May 9, 2022” – and CNN reported then that Putin was focused on May 9 as a date on which “he can show a victory.”

As Vasily Gatov, an expert in Russian media at the University of Southern California’s  Annenberg Center on Communication, said, “I have to presume that Russian generals know how keen Putin is on V-Day celebrations.” 

On the one hand, it may seem odd that a wartime leader would make tactical decisions based on a holiday. On the other, Victory Day is no ordinary holiday in Russia. It is at once a nationwide celebration of the victory over Hitler’s Reich, a recognition of extraordinary sacrifice (the Soviet Union lost at least 24 million civilians and troops during World War II) and a moment to cheer the modern nation and its military. Think Memorial Day, Veterans Day and July 4 rolled into one, overlaid with an almost North Korea-style military gloss. For decades, Victory Day meant patriotic speeches, long processions of veterans and military hardware – even nuclear warheads – in Moscow’s Red Square, and squadrons of fighter jets conducting maneuvers overhead.

For all these reasons, it’s difficult to imagine a Victory Day celebration in Russia without a narrative to match.

A “Victory Day” narrative

Putin will come to Red Square Thursday with a far better narrative – from the Russian standpoint – than he had in the first two “Victory Days” of the war. 

Since last fall, his troops have been on the offensive in Ukraine, steadily assaulting depleted Ukrainian defenses. The February capture of Avdiivka, a small industrial city in southeastern Ukraine, has been followed by a slow but steady movement through small villages, and now the threat to Chasiv Yar. 

For the 2022 and 2023 editions of Victory Day, Putin didn’t have much grist for a “victory” speech. By May 9, 2022, less than three months into the war, Russia had been staggered by Ukraine’s early counterpunch; fierce resistance had driven the Russians back, from the outskirts of Kyiv to eastern Ukraine, and inflicted a high casualty toll. A year later, that toll had surpassed Russian losses in any war since World War II, and Ukraine was gearing up for a counteroffensive to drive the Russians from occupied territory. The 2023 edition of Victory Day featured a tempered speech, a scaled-back parade, and a spectacle that was described variously as “sad,” “an embarrassment” and a “non-event.”

On this May 9, Putin and his speechwriters will have an easier time, thanks to the recent battlefield gains and the months-long delay in delivering western weapons to Ukraine. 

The world got a preview of Putin’s 2024 Victory Day message on Tuesday, when he vowed at his latest inauguration ceremony that the Russian military would “win” in Ukraine. Putin acknowledged that Russia was going through a “difficult” period (he didn’t say whether he meant the death toll or sanctions or something else), but it was a speech laden with optimism. 

“We are a united and great nation, and together we will overcome all obstacles, realize everything we have planned, and together, we will win,” Putin said. Russia would emerge from the war in Ukraine, he said, “with dignity and become even stronger.”

Kirillova expects Putin to include strong language against the West – in line with that show of captured military hardware in Victory Park. There was a preview of that this week as well; Russia announced Monday that it would hold tactical nuclear weapons drills “in the near future” in response to “threats” from Western nations.

“I think the main message on May 9 will be the formula, ‘We have already defeated a united Europe led by Hitler once, and we will do it a second time,” Kirillova told The Cipher Brief. 

“Tying modern Europe to Hitler as an image of absolute evil also makes it easier to prepare the population for a possible war with Europe, which (Russian) propaganda is increasingly talking about,” she said, adding that in that propaganda, “Russia’s struggle with the West appears as a natural continuation of the USSR’s struggle against fascist Germany, that is, the clash of ‘absolute good’ with ‘absolute evil.’”  

More muscular Victory Day rhetoric will be accompanied by a more robust military demonstration in Moscow. Russian officials have promised to show off new tanks and said that unlike the past two years, when the usual military flyovers were scrapped, this year’s parade will include aerial acrobatics from the “Russian Knights” and “Swifts,”  to be followed by six Su-25 fighter jets painting the sky over Red Square in the red, white and blue of the Russian tricolor.

After May 9, a rougher road?

Following its string of battlefield successes, the Kremlin got a dose of bad news last month – not from the war zone but from Capitol Hill, when a political logjam broke and the  long-delayed $60.8 billion military aid package passed the U.S. Congress. That aid has already begun to reach the frontlines in Ukraine; as The Cipher Brief reported earlier this week, at least one new arrival, the long-range ATACMS missiles, are already proving their worth. 

Another problem for the Kremlin, especially on a holiday that pays homage to the military and the sacrifice of soldiers, is the possibility of another mass mobilization. After more than two years of war, few developments have pierced the armor of Kremlin propaganda or diminished support for Putin; analysts in Russia and beyond believe another callup of soldiers might be an exception. 

No matter what Putin says Thursday, or how many high-end weapons make an appearance, Victory Day in 2024 will remain a shadow of the old-style celebrations. A holiday that used to regularly draw dozens of world leaders (President Bill Clinton was there in 1995, in an utterly different era of U.S.-Russia relations) will this year welcome roughly 10 heads of state – representing five Central Asian nations, along with the presidents of Cuba, Laos, Guinea-Bissau and Belarus.

Among other countries that were once part of the Soviet empire, the Victory Day holiday has either been dropped or moved to May 8, the day on which most of Europe recognizes the defeat of Germany. Latvia has decreed that May 9 is now “Ukraine Day,” a day of remembrance for victims of Putin’s war. 

In Ukraine itself, the May 9 holiday was scrapped after Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, and in a new twist, the Ukrainian community in the United States has begun an online campaign calling May 9 “Russian Shame Day.”

“We want to show that there is nothing to celebrate because all of Russia’s achievements are now associated with bloody crimes,” said Dr. Mariya Dmytriv-Kapeniak, President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America Illinois Division. 

None of this will diminish the fervor of Putin’s Victory Day speech or the military parade. Back in Moscow’s Victory Park, meanwhile, there are signs that the exhibition of Western military equipment may – like much of the Kremlin’s disinformation – be having the desired effect.

“It’s incredible, jaw-dropping,” a woman named Natalya told the BBC. She was visiting the exhibition with her husband and young daughter. “It’s amazing to think that our guys managed to get these trophies.”

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.