In Russia, Victory Day Is Starting to Feel Like Defeat
Drones are landing in Moscow, critics are starting to speak out, and Putin is even more paranoid than usual.
AS RUSSIA APPROACHES ITS BIGGEST and most sacralized national holiday—Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II—on May 9, embarrassing things are happening on the way to the grand parade. Or perhaps not so grand—more on that anon.
Last week, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square, which for decades has served as a symbol of Russian military power, will be drastically scaled back. Tanks and other military hardware will not be rolling across Red Square; there will be only a column of soldiers and military academy students marching on foot. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made no secret of the fact that the reason for this decision was the “terrorist threat” from Ukraine—that is, the fear of drone strikes. Victory parades in many other cities are being truncated as well.
But wait, it gets even more embarrassing. On April 27, Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump and, according to the spook-czar’s chief foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, “informed his American counterpart of his readiness to declare a cease-fire for the duration of the Victory Day celebrations.” (While Trump told reporters it was he who “suggested a little bit of a cease-fire,” Ushakov’s comments made it fairly clear that the suggestion came from Putin; the Russian media also reported that it was Putin who broached the idea.) Translated into plain language, it sounds an awful lot like Putin was calling Trump and asking him to lean on Volodymyr Zelensky to make sure Ukrainian drones don’t rain on the Moscow parade.
Elena Malakhovskaya, a host on the Khodorkovsky Live webcast, summed up the situation another way: “In the fifth year of the war, it’s Zelensky who decides whether Putin can appear at the parade on Red Square.”
The drone strike that breached Moscow’s air defenses on Monday is not likely to allay Putin’s fears.
Ukrainian drones have been making Russia very nervous lately, with strikes as far away from the frontlines as Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Perm—more than 600 miles from the Ukrainian border. The official line voiced by Putin and amplified by his propagandists such as Rossiya-1 “journalist” Olga Skabeyeva, is that Ukraine is resorting to aerial “terrorism” because it is steadily losing on the ground. But that line is getting harder to sell. In the West, even erstwhile Ukraine skeptics such as blogger Andrew Sullivan now hail “the Ukrainian miracle.” And in Russia, even the war-hawk bloggers are increasingly speaking of defeats and “dead-end” warfare.
There’s a reason for the shift. In April, the latest reports say, Russia lost more territory in Ukraine than it captured for the first time since mid-2023. As Brynn Tannehill and others have noted, this spring has seen a subtle but significant shift in the strategic balance of the war. Ukrainian drone production now matches or exceeds Russia’s, and its quality is generally better. Ukrainian unmanned ground combat vehicles are changing the character of combat on the front lines and correcting for the smaller country’s manpower deficit—all while achieving the highest numbers of Russian casualties in any month of the war so far. Ukrainian long-range strikes knocked out some 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity just as prices were rising because of the Hormuz crisis, and further strikes have diminished Russia’s already limited domestic refining capacity. Russia’s spring offensive appears to have been blunted even before it began.
As a result, the Kremlin and its sockpuppets have little to brag about. Endless Russian news reports about troop movements and battles around the village of Mala Tokmachka in Zaporizhzhia—prewar population about 3,000, with some 200 residents currently remaining—have become a joke. (No less a figure than Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has unironically asserted that the “liberation” of Mala Tokmachka would be “a serious step toward accomplishing the goals of the special military operation.”)
Some of the Russian “milbloggers” have always allowed themselves more candid assessments of Russian military incompetence than the official media, probably because their pro-war stance gives them more leeway. But expatriate Russian analyst Michael Nacke observes that the criticism, or the handwringing, has grown far more outspoken lately. What’s more, even members of the Russian media establishment, such as Dmitry Steshin, a reporter for the mainstream Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, are contributing. “The tempo of the offensive has changed,” Steshin said on a recent livestream. “Ukraine is feverishly stepping up its abilities. Their strategy of a wall of drones and an offensive aided by robots has worked.” Steshin also offered “an unpleasant quote” from a Ukrainian POW, reported to him by a Russian source: “He said that you bring a truckload of men to the front lines, and we bring a truckload of FPV drones.”
AWAY FROM THE FRONT LINES, the drone strikes on oil refineries in the Black Sea port of Tuapse have had a devastating effect. The fires, the oil spills, and the release of noxious gases are adding up to an environmental catastrophe. While comparisons to the Chernobyl disaster are hyperbolic, one similarity is that for nearly two weeks, the Russian media maintained a complete silence about the strikes. Then, Putin finally mentioned the Tuapse situation—and promptly minimized it, citing regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev’s assertion that “there are no serious dangers, and people are managing to deal with the challenges.” Meanwhile, video clips of apocalyptic billows of smoke and fire rising over the city and oil pooling on beaches have been going viral. “We get a typically Soviet situation when everyone knows we’re being lied to,” émigré political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told a Ukrainian journalist. He added that, after so many years of being told that under Putin, Russia was “rising from its knees,” people are becoming irritated that the dictator can’t keep them safe.
Direct criticism of Putin, beaten into submission and silence since the invasion of Ukraine—and the imprisonment and subsequent murder of Alexei Navalny—seems to be rearing its head again, online and even in the streets. And sometimes, people are getting away with it. In Novosibirsk, Russia’s third-largest city, with a population of nearly 1.7 million, a local Communist activist gave a May Day rally speech expressing outrage that draftees who are almost children are being sent to die on the frontlines while the sons of Putin’s top officials, and Putin’s own daughters, are living the good life. (Only about thirty people showed up for the rally, but that’s a lot considering protesters have been jailed in Russia in recent years for one-person demonstrations featuring blank placards.)
Popular livestreamer Vladislav Zhmilevsky recently went after Putin far more directly, juxtaposing footage of the Tuapse fires with a 2024 clip of a smug-looking Putin joking dismissively about Russians who worry too much. “Why the fuck would you say such dumb shit?” commented Zhmilevsky as he played the clip. Pushing his heresy even further, he also warned that Putin was getting people to the point where they would not only rejoice at his death but fervently wish it had happened sooner. Zhmilevsky, as it happens, is a member of Putin’s United Russia party.
And those aren’t the only examples. For instance, the recent drama around formerly pro-Kremlin, pro-war lawyer and blogger Ilya Remeslo, who suddenly started posting strident critiques of Putin and ended up in a mental hospital, has continued since Remeslo’s discharge/release. He even intensified his criticism on a popular webcast (a political soap opera that deserves its own story). Is the repressive apparatus in Russia starved of resources because of the war and spread too thin to crack down on Putin critics? Or could it be that, as blogger Maksim Katz suggests, there’s a tacit signal that “now, this is allowed”? Is Putin losing his aura? Is the relative leniency due, as some think, to infighting between different Kremlin factions?
With the war going badly and greater numbers of Russians able to see the truth and feel its effects, Putin is focusing on his top priority: A leaked intelligence report from a European country says that Putin is tightening his personal security not only because he fears Ukrainian drones, but because he fears an internal coup. Will the “bunker grandpa,” as Putin has long been dubbed by critics, spend Victory Day in his bunker?