Every year on May 9, Russia turns Victory Day into its most important exercise in state propaganda.
The parade on Red Square is designed to project strength abroad and reinforce loyalty at home. It is an orchestrated display of military power, historical mythology, and political messaging wrapped around the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945.
This year, however, Moscow’s celebrations were noticeably subdued. There was no military equipment on display for the first time in years. Four years into its invasion of Ukraine, it is becoming obvious that the Kremlin has little to boast about.
Apparently fearing the possibility of Ukrainian drones over their capital, Moscow declared a unilateral ceasefire for Victory Day while warning Ukraine of a “massive missile strike” on Kyiv if the commemorations were disrupted.
Yet, if the past is anything to go by, such pauses are fragile at best: indeed, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs accused Moscow of violating the ceasefire.
In contemporary Russian state narratives, Victory Day reinforces the idea that the Soviet Union saved the world from Nazism and sacrificed more than 27 million lives in the Second World War, in a loss that remains a powerful emotional touchstone.
Putin has long drawn on this legacy to bolster Russia’s standing abroad and reinforce his authority domestically, and he used the Nazi analogy to justify the war in Ukraine. He has described Russia’s goal in Ukraine as “denazification”, portrayed Moscow as an “indestructible barrier to Nazism”, and presents the invasion as a continuation of that struggle. He has declared that “victory will be ours, like in 1945” and insisted that there is “no room in the world for Nazis”.
Yet Russia is waging a full-scale war in Ukraine that is widely regarded as the most destructive conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
The Kremlin’s control over Second World War memory is enforced not just through narrative but through law. A 2014 statute criminalises “spreading intentionally false information” about the Soviet Union’s actions in the Second World War or “desecrating symbols of military glory”.
In 2021, this was tightened further with penalties for any public attempt to equate the USSR and Nazi Germany or to question the Soviet Union’s “decisive role” in defeating fascism.
Putin has revamped Russia’s education system by replacing history textbooks with Kremlin-approved ones. These textbooks teach children Russia did not enter the Second World War until Germany invaded in 1941.
What is consistently absent from this narrative is any serious acknowledgement of inconvenient history, including the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, under which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided parts of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and plunged Europe into darkness. It also omits that, in the same period, the USSR absorbed the Baltic states and fought a harsh war with Finland.
Putin has also promoted the idea that the Soviet Union could have won the war largely on its own, emphasising that “the Soviet people shouldered the main burden of the fight against Nazism.” As President Trump correctly put it: the Second World War could not have been won (not even close!) without the United States of America.
That reality is reflected in the US Lend-Lease programme, which supplied the Soviet Union with vast quantities of equipment, vehicles, food, and raw materials that materially supported the war effort.
When history is weaponised, truth itself becomes part of the contest. The West should turn the tables on Russia’s propaganda and highlight the truth about Putin’s false Second World War narratives.
This year’s Victory Day celebration in Red Square carried an awkward undertone: more spectacle than strength. The parade was scaled back, military hardware notably absent, and North Korean troops were present, a fitting symbol of how far Moscow’s “great power” status has slipped. For a leader who built his legitimacy on strength, the display looked like theatre masking weakness.
For all of Putin’s cultivated image as a geopolitical chess master, the board is starting to look empty. Declaring that “victory has always been and always will be ours,” he still could not claim victory in Ukraine. The choreography in Red Square may still dazzle, but the story it is meant to tell is getting harder to sell.
