Putin’s Victory Day speech leaves no clue on future escalation
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Vladimir Putin exhorted Russians to battle in a defiant Victory Day speech on Monday, but was silent about plans for any escalation in Ukraine, despite Western warnings he might use his Red Square address to order a national mobilisation.
In Ukraine, there was no let-up in fighting, with Kyiv describing a stepped-up Russian offensive in the east and a renewed push to defeat the last Ukrainian troops holding out in a steelworks in ruined Mariupol.
Monday’s annual parade in Moscow – with the usual ballistic missiles and tanks rumbling across the cobblestones – was easily the most closely watched since the 1945 defeat of the Nazis that it celebrates.
Western capitals had openly speculated for weeks that Putin was driving his forces to achieve enough progress by the symbolic date to declare victory – but with few gains so far, might instead announce a national call-up for war.
He did neither, but repeated his assertions that Russian forces were again fighting Nazis.
“You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World War II. So that there is no place in the world for executioners, castigators and Nazis,” Putin said from the tribune outside the Kremlin walls.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his own speech, promised Ukrainians they would defeat the invasion.
“On the Day of Victory over Nazism, we are fighting for a new victory. The road to it is difficult, but we have no doubt that we will win,” said Zelenskyy, in plain army garb with his shirt sleeves rolled-up.
In a clear reference to Putin, Zelenskyy added: “The one who is repeating the horrific crimes of Hitler’s regime today, following Nazi philosophy, copying everything they did – he is doomed.”
Putin’s war has killed thousands of civilians, sent millions fleeing and reduced cities to rubble. Russia has little to show for it beyond a strip of territory in the south and marginal gains in the east.
Sheltering in a metro station in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking second city, which has been bombed relentlessly since the war’s first days, World War II survivor Vira Mykhailivna, 90, buried her tear-stained cheeks in her palms.
“I didn’t think this could ever happen to us,” she said. “This day was once a great celebration”.
Kateryna Grigoriyevna, 79, a retired bank manager who has spent 10 weeks underground in the cavernous station, sat eating an ice cream she had ventured out to buy for Victory Day.
“We hate Putin,” she said, glancing around the platform where some 200 people cluster in tents and on thin mattresses.
