Single tank is all Putin can muster to lead military ‘victory parade’
Estimates of the Kremlin’s military casualties may be far too low given Kyiv’s use of new precision weapons
Vladimir Putin yesterday watched a single Second World War tank roll through Moscow’s Victory Day parade, underscoring just how much weaponry his army has lost in Ukraine.
The T-34, an 83-year-old relic, has traditionally opened the annual display because of its symbolic role in helping Russia overcome Nazi Germany.
However, the Soviet-era tank is normally followed by more modern fighting machines in a full display of Moscow’s military might.
This year’s parade had a total of 51 vehicles in comparison with 131 last year and 197 in 2021, according to analyst Oliver Alexander. Featured were 10 armoured vehicles used only by Chechen forces.
The amount of military equipment was always likely to be underwhelming compared with recent years as the war in Ukraine rages on. But there’s underwhelming and then there’s “millennium bug” levels of underwhelming. Yesterday’s parade eclipsed even the latter.
The lack of tanks was the most glaring sign of the attrition facing Putin’s war machine. Moscow is believed to have lost 3,734 tanks in the war so far, according to Ukrainian government figures.
Last year, the T-34 was accompanied by a T-14 Armata and a T-74, two of Russia’s more modern battle tanks, which have both been spotted on the battlefield in Ukraine. Russia has desperately been attempting to plug its shortfall of tanks by taking older models out of deep storage to send across the border.
Just 10 weapons systems were on display during the military parade yesterday, while the aerial portion, which usually features fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, was cancelled entirely.
Last year the Russian ministry of defence announced that 131 types of weapons were involved, with an airshow of 77 aircraft and helicopters.
In what was the smallest number of troops featured since 2008, just 8,000 marched across Red Square – fewer than at the Victory Day parade in 2020, which was held six weeks late because of the Covid pandemic.
Last year, 11,000 troops took part in the parade in Moscow. The marching troops were, for the most part, not actually troops but cadets and students of military universities.
Footage of the Red Square festivities was not captured from air this year after a drone ban was enacted following an attack on the Kremlin last week. Outside Moscow, celebrations were also pared back with more than 20 Russian cities cancelling their annual parades.
Also cancelled was a nationwide Immortal Regiment march in which ordinary Russians each year carry pictures of deceased veterans. Some commentators speculated that the Kremlin did not want to run the risk of marchers holding up photographs of recently killed fighters in Ukraine in a form of protest.
“Putin has presided over the greatest and swiftest military collapse Russia has known in recent history,” Michael Horowitz, a geopolitical and security analyst, said.
Putin could have injected a bit of oomph into proceedings with a grand display of diplomatic support from his friends. Certainly, his speech was the usual fire-breathing stuff, full of Nazis (us) and degenerates (us, again). But, like the parade, it was full of bluster but short on detail.
Standing on stage on Red Square, Putin lashed out at the West, saying a “real war has been unleashed against Russia” and sought to portray Ukraine as a “hostage” of the West and its “neonazi” allies.
He said that Russia’s future “rests on” soldiers fighting in Ukraine. “There is nothing more important now than your combat effort,” the Russian president said, addressing troops fighting in Ukraine, some of whom were present at the parade. He continued: “The security of the country rests on you today, the future of our statehood and our people depend on you.”
The leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the six-member grouping of post-soviet states (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia) that Putin wants the world to view as a Nato-equivalent, were present, but none seemed particularly happy to be there.
Notably, the three most important, Alexander Lukashenko (illegitimate leader of Belarus), Kassym-jomart Tokayev (president of Kazakhstan) and Nikol Pashinyan (Armenia’s prime minister and chairman of the CSTO Security Council) seemed eager to keep as much distance from Putin as possible.
This is not sentimental Kremlinology – the dark arts of trying to work out the Kremlin’s “who’s hot and who’s not” list, based on who is standing where and next to whom – this stuff matters and is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Putin’s kleptocracy.
What to make of it all? Putin has sought to position himself as the legitimate heir to, indeed as the personification of, the spirit of the wartime generation. He sees the Victory Day parade as the manifestation of his power.
If ever there had been a time to show off military prowess, this was it.
We are now 15 months into Russia’s two-week lightning offensive and Moscow has gone from saying “We’ll be in Kyiv in three days” to “Don’t worry, Putin wasn’t killed in the drone attack on the Kremlin last night”.
Putin needed to show strength and control today. The latter he achieved, over cadet bands and about a dozen all-terrain vehicles painted green.
The former? Not so much, and that will have been noticed around the world and, possibly more worrying for Putin, inside Russia.
It was a curious sight. Russia’s annual Victory Day parade, a display of military might and a celebration of its role in defeating Nazi Germany, could only muster a solitary T-34. The serried ranks of tanks seen in recent years were absent; many of them will be lying burned out in the Donbas. Vladimir Putin’s speech was desperate, even delusional. He claimed civilisation was “at a decisive turning point”; that a “real war has been unleashed against Russia”; that the West seeks the “disintegration and destruction” of Russia. The only person driving towards that goal is Putin himself.
His army is in a shambolic condition, with multiple reports indicating that troops are fighting without adequate body armour. Young men are conscripted and thrown into the meat grinder of the Donbas, backed by antiquated tanks. They face forces combining modern Western equipment with significant new tactical innovations. And they are being slaughtered.
Over the past century, battlefield casualties for Western forces have seen a steady decline. Modern medical techniques, antibiotics and military developments have all played their role. But assumptions based on this experience may not work when estimating the losses suffered by Putin’s poorly equipped conscripts.
Ukrainian reports of Russian casualties resemble something from the fronts of the First World War, with hundreds killed and injured each day. Western analysts have tended to be more conservative in their estimates.
But this conflict is not like those we have seen previously. Kyiv’s forces are innovating new ways of conducting warfare, with drones at their heart. Tech-savvy young men and women are repurposing and re-engineering for the battlefield off-the-shelf and inexpensive equipment developed for peace.
This is a game-changing moment. Russia’s armed forces are centred around the use of artillery; various sources list Moscow’s expenditure of shells as multiples of Ukraine’s. And yet even pessimistic assessments show a casualty ratio skewed heavily in Ukraine’s favour, despite being theoretically outgunned.
The key to this appears to be innovation. What is unique to the Ukraine conflict is the use of both drones as striking weapons and as platforms for observation. Some analysts suggest that using the standard ratios of deaths/wounded will be very far from reflecting the lethality of this new mode of warfare. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the vast majority of artillery rounds and mortar shells fired by Kyiv’s forces will be watched by drone, allowing for – in artillery terms, at least – pinpoint accuracy.
And the pace of change is set to continue. The Ukrainians have trained 10,000 drone operators, who will add to Kyiv’s capability to observe and guide indirect fire. This type of attack was called precision targeting when I first went to Afghanistan in 2008. In those days we would have a huge Nimrod aircraft with 20 or so operators on board, flying at 20,000ft with a single camera. There would be five or six of us on the ground monitoring the live feed; if the right target was identified, we called in a precision air strike from a fighter jet. We conducted a few of these strikes per week. Later, we moved on to Reaper drones with hellfire missiles. But these strikes were rare; what Kyiv is doing is new.
Fighting a battle for national survival, every tank or enemy combatant is a fair target. The Ukrainians are developing techniques not only focused on precision attack but also on directing artillery fire. Battlefield footage may look like the First World War – trenches, shells and casualties abound – but we have moved on from rare balloon spotters sending messages to guns. Now, there are hundreds of tiny drones with amazingly capable cameras, giving detailed pictures and highly accurate metadata back to the guns. This is a type of warfare which few in Nato have ever experienced; when Russian casualty rates as estimated by the West appear to be half what the Ukrainians are claiming, it is surely possible that the Ukrainians are right.
This is backed up by the scramble in Russia to find soldiers. Both sides might lack ammunition, but the Kremlin appears to be running out of soldiers to fire that ammunition. The long-term costs for Russia are likely to be devastating.