Russia’s Victory Day parade saw just one solo tank roll through Moscow’s Red Square on Tuesday during what is supposed to be a celebration of Russia’s military strength.
After watching the small trickle of armoured vehicles roll through the Russian capital, President Vladimir Putin accused NATO of “pursuing the dissolution and the destruction of our country.” Victory Day is supposed to be a celebration of the USSR’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, but Putin spent more than half of his speech complaining about the war in Ukraine that Russia stated, and linking the victory over Germany to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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The downsizing of what is usually a bombastic event shocked Western observers, with several open source investigators speculating that heavy losses in material equipment contributed to this much smaller event. 2022’s event saw over 130 pieces of military hardware on parade, while this year’s had just a handful of armoured vehicles and not a single plane or helicopter.
“A real war has been unleashed against our motherland again,” Putin told the crowd outside the Kremlin as a single World War II-era tank rumbled past. “Battles that decide the fate of our motherland have always become all-encompassing, patriotic and sacred.”
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. After a series of devastating setbacks in the first year of the war that destroyed as much as half of Russia’s available military equipment, Putin has since reframed the invasion as an existential fight with the West for the survival of Russia.
The massive losses appear to have affected the annual celebration of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is known in Russia. But in the wake of suspected attacks by Ukrainian and Russian partisans throughout parts of Russia – including a mysterious drone attack last week at the site of the parade outside the Kremlin – at least 20 local municipalities cancelled their events .
A NATO official in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to speak on the record, said this year’s parade lacked the typical displays of Russian military technology such as the normally parade ubiquitous modern T-14 Armada and T-90 tanks, columns of long range ballistic missiles, motorised heavy artillery, and elite Russian paratroopers (known as the VDV) because of the heavy fighting taxing Russian forces.
“We know why the VDV wasn’t there today, they’re mostly dead outside Kyiv and Kherson,” said the official of the paratroopers and their distinctive blue berets, which play an outsized role in Russian Army propaganda efforts.
Military analysts have concluded that at least half the VDV’s manpower – representing a large portion of Russia’s better trained professional soldiers – have been killed or wounded since the invasion began last year.
“Instead [today] we mostly saw new conscripts and military cadets and the Russian’s didn’t announce the participation of their elite units with roots back to the Second World War as they normally would,” said the official. “This tracks with our intelligence analysis that determined Russian elite units are barely functioning after massive losses in the first year of the war.”
Open source researchers have visually confirmed the destruction of more than 1,300 tanks as well as thousands of armoured fighting vehicles, artillery pieces and other equipment in just over a year. Although Russia is estimated to have about 5,000 tanks left, many are very old models that have been in storage for decades, according to NATO. The single tank, NATO analysts believe, was intended to remind Russians of the World War II victory without focusing on the current losses of equipment and vehicles in Ukraine.
“They’re low on modern equipment in Ukraine and will have to choose whether to risk what’s left of their better stuff [that’s] deployed with units meant to protect Kaliningrad or fight a Polish-Baltic conflict,” said the NATO official. “Putin probably thought he was being clever with the single T-34 tank but all it did was highlight how he’s running out of trained soldiers and modern equipment.”
As Ukraine prepares for a long-anticipated counteroffensive later this spring, a number of attacks on Russian fuel depots, air bases and other infrastructure in areas of Ukraine currently occupied by Russian troops as well as suspected attacks on targets in Russian districts along the border have rattled Russia.
“Dozens of towns cancelling the annual celebration of Russian military courage over fears of Ukrainian partisan attacks, Putin surrounding himself with the leaders of Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and others on the parade stand as a way to prevent a drone attack, and limiting the event to just 10 minutes in public,” said the official. “I’d wager Ukraine is deeply inside Putin’s head at this point.”
