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International commentators have been left scratching their heads after witnessing a solitary Soviet-era T-34 medium tank taking centrestage during Russia’s scaled-back Victory Day military parade on 9 May.
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The celebration of victory against Nazi Germany in World War II is traditionally the nation’s largest and most public showcase of military might and usually features its most modern tanks, missile launchers, and technology.
Columns of Russian T-90A, T-14 Armata, and “Terminator” tanks have rolled through Red Square, flanked by artillery and shadowed by MiG fighter jets and military helicopters flying overhead in previous years.
This year’s parade (78th anniversary) was comparatively solemn with the T-34, around 8,000 troops, several Tigr-M, 3-STS Akhmat, VPK-7829 Bumerang IFVs, VPK-Ural armoured cars, BTR-82A APCs, S-400 Triumf air defense systems, and a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile system with no aircraft flyover.
There were also fewer international diplomats in attendance this year including representatives from Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Whether a stark insight into military equipment demands elsewhere on the frontlines of Ukraine or an elaborate ruse of publicity, this year’s Victory parade was lacklustre at best.
During the parade, Russian President Vladimir Putin said a war provoked by the West has been unleashed against Russia in Ukraine.
“Today, our civilisation is at a crucial turning point. A real war is being waged against our country again, but we have countered international terrorism and will defend the people of Donbass and safeguard our security,” he said.
“The Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human.
“They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality, is a system of plundering, violence, and suppression.
“They seem to have forgotten what the Nazis’ insane claims of global dominance led to. They forgot who destroyed that monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives to liberate the peoples of Europe.
“We see how in certain countries they ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers, demolish monuments to great commanders, create a real cult of the Nazis and their proxies, erase and demonise the memory of true heroes.
“Their goal … is to break apart and destroy our country, to make null and void the outcomes of World War II, to completely break down the system of global security and international law, to choke off any sovereign centres of development.”
Russian special operation forces are fighting to defend themselves and the residents of Donbas, against international terrorism, he said during the parade.
“Boundless ambition, arrogance, and impunity inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe the Ukrainian people are going through,” he said.
“They have become hostage to the coup d’état and the resulting criminal regime of its Western masters, collateral damage in the implementation of their cruel and self-serving plans.”
Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko openly mocked the smaller parade on Twitter, saying, “There was one tank at the parade in Moscow. T-34, we laugh all over Ukraine.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also took the opportunity to submit a draft law to the Ukrainian Parliament suggesting 8 May become “the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in the Second World War” rather than 9 May in a distancing move away from Russia.
“Today, I submitted a bill to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine proposing that May 8 be the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in the Second World War of 1939-1945,” Zelenskyy said.
“We will never forget the contribution of the Ukrainian people to the victory over Nazism. And we will not allow lies as if the victory in that war could have taken place without the participation of any country or nation.
“As then we destroyed evil together, so now we are destroying a similar evil together. Unfortunately, evil has returned.
“Although now it is another aggressor, the goal is the same — enslavement or destruction. And just as then we relied on the joint strength of free nations, so now we fight against evil together with the free world, together with free Europe.”
