Years follow each other and look alike in the Red Square. Since 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has appropriated on the day of the USSR victory over Nazi Germany, celebrated every May 9, to do a pure propaganda exercise tinged with revisionism. The parallel between the Second World War and the current conflict in Ukraine has thus become a central element of its discourse, Russia being systematically presented as the assaulted country and not as the aggressor it is. To justify his “special operation” of invasion of his neighbor a little over three years ago, Vladimir Putin even invoked the “denazification” of Ukraine …
This year again, the master of the Kremlin should greet the Russian soldiers fighting in Donbass, presenting them as the equal of the “heroes” of the fatherland of 80 years ago. And gargling from having succeeded – despite Western pressures and Ukrainian threats not to respect “his” truce – to bring in the gallery around thirty heads of state, including the Chinese Xi Jinping, the Brazilian Lula, who would like to play a role of mediator in the conflict, and a Kyrielle of leaders, traditional allied autocrats of Russia. All will attend a millimeter military parade … but which will have everything from the Potemkin village.
The lustrous uniforms of the troops and the gleaming weapons will, in fact, hide a much less brilliant reality. The one where the powerful Russian army-who expected to seize Ukraine in a few days with a Blitzkrieg-has failed to dominate the incredible and ingenious Ukrainian resistance or to detach the Ukrainians from their Volodymyr Zelensky; The one where we saw an aging Russian military material and young distraught soldiers; The one where Russia had to appeal to Iranian drones, to North Korea troops and perhaps even from China to hold the front; that where the worst abuses were led by Wagner mercenaries; The one where the Russian army, certainly, took over the Koursk region conquered in the summer of 2024 by kyiv, but nibbled only a few square kilometers along the front line; The exact number of dead soldiers is a state secret, evoking it liable to prison.
-The reality that Putin will not speak to his guests, is also that in spite of the voltages of a Donald Trump, however much better disposed towards him that Joe well, he did not manage to obtain from him a peace or even a cease-fire to his advantage; He could not prevent Ukraine from signing an agreement on minerals with the United States; He did not divide the European Union but on the contrary resources it, behind Zekensky and around a colossal rearmament plan of 800 billion euros.
Finally behind his parade from another time, Putin will say nothing about the socio-economic reality of her country. The Russian President has hardly new tax revenue, no new oil revenues from his ghost fleet and all state revenues are decreasing when galloping inflation. Whatever it says, Western sanctions weigh heavily and the Russian economy, if it knows some cleverly staging in the state media, is well below what it was before the war.
On May 4, a documentary to his glory was broadcast on Russian television presenting Putin as “irreplaceable”, but after 25 years of power, the master of the Kremlin is confronted with the most formidable adversary of the dictatorships: the wheel of time passing, against which no parade, nor any lie, holds.
