Putin stops short of declaring war during Victory Day celebration

It could have been a moment of triumph.

If Vladimir Putin's February invasion of Ukraine had gone as planned, the Russian president would have been reviewing Monday's Victory Day parade on Kyiv's Independence Square — claiming a triumph as glorious, in his view, as 1945 itself.

Instead, his troops were marching through Red Square in Moscow with a fraction of the hardware they usually display and none of the aircraft — and the comparisons he drew were not between two Victories, but two bloody but righteous struggles.

Putin was always going to compare the war in Ukraine with the Second World War in a bid to rally the country. But he did not, as some predicted, claim “mission accomplished.” Nor did he use it to formally declare war or announce mass mobilization.

Putin delivered an orthodox Victory Day speech: praising the generation of Soviet men and women who crushed the German Nazis, urging Russians to try to live up to their memory, and invoking the victory as an almost mystical bond holding the nation together. But everyone knew this year was about another war, and he quickly came to the point.

He invoked the memory of Soviet soldiers who fought the Nazis “at Kyiv Minsk, Sevastopol and Kharkiv — just as today you are fighting for our people in Donbas, for the safety of our mother Russia.”

Russia, he said, had always stood for peace and the prevention of a repetition of the horrors of the Second World War. In the past year, it had proposed a dialogue on the indivisibility of security. But the West had other ideas.

It armed Ukraine, which was preparing it for a “neoNazi” attack on the Donbas. Kyiv might even have developed a nuclear bomb, creating an “absolutely unacceptable threat to our security, right on our borders.”

“The threat was growing day by day. It was the correct, timely, and absolutely only possible decision,” he said of his decision to invade. In fact, if he hadn't started this war, there could have been an even bigger one, he said.

In the end, he told his soldiers they were fighting a just, noble war in the same tradition as their grandparents.

— MIKHAIL METZEL/SPUTNIK/AFP Russian President Vladimir Putin watches the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow Monday. The event celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War.