This year’s Victory Day in Moscow felt unrecognizable — a muted, cautious affair where the usual pageantry was conspicuously toned down. May 9, the date Russians use to commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany, has for years doubled as a stage for military spectacle and national pride. This time, however, the spectacle was missing.
Most striking was the absence of heavy equipment. For the first time in nearly two decades the tanks, rocket launchers and intercontinental missiles that normally roll across Red Square did not appear. In their place, large screens showed footage of weapons operating far from the capital or being tested at remote ranges. Fighter jets still traced the tricolour across the sky, but the iconic parade line-up on the ground was sparse — a display that suggested caution rather than confidence.
The reasons were obvious. Over the past year Ukrainian drones have penetrated deeper into Russian territory, striking fuel depots, airfields and other infrastructure well beyond the front. In the run-up to the ceremony a drone hit a high-end residential complex in Moscow, prompting the Kremlin to openly flag the “current operational situation” as the rationale for scaling back. Authorities shut down sections of mobile internet that could aid drone navigation and set up sweeping security cordons around Red Square.
There was a bitter irony to those precautions. Victory Day is meant to broadcast strength and resolve. The elaborate measures taken simply to keep the event incident-free instead underscored a vulnerability: an effective strike on the capital during the parade would have done more to shake Russia’s image than any battlefield loss.
The diplomatic and political backdrop added to the awkwardness. The parade coincided with a short, three-day ceasefire brokered by former US president Donald Trump, put forward as a possible step toward peace. In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the moment with a wry decree “permitting” Russia to hold its celebrations undisturbed, even providing coordinates for Red Square and declaring the site temporarily off-limits to Ukrainian strikes — a gesture Russian officials dismissed as a joke, but one that made a point.
A new and telling sight on the reviewing stand was a contingent of North Korean soldiers marching alongside Russian troops, a public sign of ties that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Pyongyang is believed to have dispatched thousands of personnel to support Russian operations in Ukraine. At the same time, the list of foreign dignitaries was thin: where leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping once stood beside Vladimir Putin, this year Moscow mostly hosted representatives from allied or friendly states like Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Laos.
Officials also let slip a more prosaic explanation for the missing hardware: much of it is needed at the front. The conflict has stretched longer than the Soviet Union’s campaign against Nazi Germany, and Western estimates put Russian killed and wounded in the hundreds of thousands, with combined casualties exceeding a million.
The consequences are spreading through the economy and society. Inflation bites, sanctions tighten, budget deficits widen and popular patience frays beneath a layer of official patriotic rhetoric. What was intended as reassurance — a triumphant display on a sacred national day — instead highlighted the mounting costs and strains of a war that shows no easy end.