KYIV, Ukraine — With international pressure mounting and his invasion of Ukraine failing to make significant advances, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a strident speech Monday at an annual military parade in Moscow, accusing the U.S. and the West of provoking the conflict and comparing it to the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany in World War II.
But the Russian leader stopped short of using the occasion — known as Victory Day to mark the defeat of Hitler’s forces 77 years ago — to declare an all-out war with Ukraine, as some analysts feared he would. Russia still refers to the invasion as a “special military operation,” which does not require a full national mobilization of resources for war.
Standing in front of decorated veterans in Red Square, Putin characterized Russia as having had no choice but to strike back against the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the West’s refusal to provide Moscow with security guarantees.
“The danger was rising by the day,” Putin said. “Russia has given a preemptive response to an aggression.”
He said Russian soldiers in Ukraine were “fighting for the motherland, so that no one will forget the lessons of World War II and there will be no place in the world for hangmen, executioners and the Nazis.”
The parade, which included a display of military equipment, marching soldiers and a martial band, came as Russian forces continued to inflict deadly harm on Ukrainian civilians and as Western nations imposed more sanctions on Russia’s hobbled economy.
The commemorations in Moscow coincided with frequent air-raid alerts in cities and towns across Ukraine, where officials pleaded with the public to take heed and find shelter when sirens sounded or phone apps blared.
In counterprogramming of sorts to the Kremlin’s display, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that his nation would emerge victorious from the fight against its behemoth neighbor.
“We are fighting for our children’s freedom and therefore we will win,” Zelenskyy said in a video address Monday while striding in daylight down a major Kyiv thoroughfare, with stately buildings and antitank “hedgehogs” fashioned from fused I-beams visible in the background. “Very soon there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine. And someone won’t have any.”
Allyson Edwards, an expert on Russian militarism at Britain’s University of Warwick, said Putin’s speech was purposefully “underwhelming” to give him more flexibility in handling the war, which has dragged on far longer than he likely thought it would and forced him to re-strategize, such as withdrawing troops from around Kyiv.
“Lots of people thought he might declare mobilization or victory, and he didn’t,” Edwards said. “He used the platform to justify continued war in the region.”
Ukraine had marked the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany a day earlier, in line with commemorations in Western Europe, where World War II ended on the night of May 8, 1945 (in Russia, it was already May 9). In a video speech Sunday from Borodyanka, a town outside the capital that has been devastated by Russian bombardment and occupation, Zelenskyy confirmed the deaths of dozens of people in the weekend bombing of a school in the village of Bilohorivka, in contested Luhansk province in the east.
Zelenskyy said about 60 people died — “civilians, who simply hid at the school, sheltering from shelling.”
Throughout the 10-week-old Russian offensive, schools — which often serve as bomb shelters — have been vulnerable to attack. Ukrainian officials said Monday that in the course of the war, more than 1,600 educational institutions had been damaged by bombardment, 126 of them destroyed.
Luhansk’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, was among officials who appealed for special caution Monday, citing the possibility of more “terrible” events.
