Putin’s weakness is terminal – I saw the beginning of the end ...Middle East

Ranks of Russia’s armed forces lined up before him on Red Square, Vladimir Putin reminded his audience that this was the nation’s “most important public holiday”. This year, though, with the risk that Ukraine’s forces might decide to strike during the ceremony, it was far less impressive – a scaled-down version of recent years’ grander displays of martial might.

The parade lasted little more than 45 minutes. There were no tanks or missiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with the skill of the comic actor he once was, even made an impudent attempt to steal Putin’s show. He issued a decree saying he would permit the parade to go ahead, and that Ukrainian weapons would not target Red Square while it did.

I first witnessed the parade in 1995, in a different Europe and a different world. It was the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The Cold War was also over. A new era of peace lay ahead. Leaders from all over the world came to join the ceremony.

Some 26 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed in the Second World War, known more usually in Russian as the Great Patriotic War. In a country that lived through the fall of the imperial Romanov dynasty, seven decades of Soviet communism and a ruthless form of bandit capitalism in the last century, the defeat of Nazi Germany remains a source of unquestioned pride. No wonder Russians want to remember.

But in recent years, Victory Day has increasingly been about making a statement on contemporary politics: trying to boost patriotic pride at home and send a warning to the West.

I first went to Moscow as a journalist in 1991, in the dying days of the Soviet Union. In the decades that followed, I reported on the economic and political turmoil of the 1990s, Putin’s rise to power and his leading Russia into renewed confrontation with the West.

I watched the Victory parade in person as a correspondent, or via Russian state television’s lavish coverage, at least a dozen times to see what it told us about the state of the country and Putin’s thinking. This year, I made sure I watched, too.

It was impossible to hide the fact that this weekend’s parade was a far more muted affair. Russian state television tried to make up for the lack of military hardware on show by broadcasting video of forces in training for the “special military operation” (the Kremlin’s term for its war on Ukraine) as part of their coverage.

The commemoration of Victory Day has been a massive part of Putin’s rebuilding of Russia, ever since Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008 was preceded by the return of tanks to the parade earlier the same year. That May, I was among a small number of foreign correspondents invited to watch from the seating area beneath the Kremlin wall reserved for dignitaries and the dwindling number of veterans. Thanks to a technique perfected during the Soviet era for dispersing rain clouds, the sky was a perfect spring blue.

We were kept waiting in an office near Red Square for more than two hours before being allowed to take up our places. I didn’t mind. This was a chance to witness history – the first time since the Soviet era that contemporary military hardware would roll across the Moscow landmark’s famous cobblestones. “It was impressive in the sense that in a country where so much is often chaotic, this was a model of precision,” I wrote in my diary that evening. The marchers never missed a single step; the military music – songs of farewells as soldiers headed to the front – rang out.

It was also a remarkable year in that Putin was not president. He had stepped down earlier that year, as the constitution then required, and Dmitry Medvedev – “short and decidedly non-military”, I wrote of his appearance that day – was in the leading role, where he remained until 2012.

Later that year, when Russia went to war in Georgia over the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it became clear Putin was still the boss. He flew back from Beijing, where he had been representing Russia at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, to head towards the war zone to raise morale.

Perhaps Russia’s militarism had its rebirth that bright spring day. Certainly, from the war in Georgia, it is not hard to trace a line to the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and the launching of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Perhaps there was even a warning of what was to come all the way back in 1995. Then, western leaders stayed away from part of the ceremony that might have included troops then serving in Russia’s first Chechen war – a campaign that cost tens of thousands of civilian lives.

The second war in Chechnya, from 1999, gave Putin the platform on which he built his political career.

His hard line on the rebels burnished his tough guy image, one he has developed ever since. Being forced to scale down the Victory Day parade has made him look weak and has reminded the world that the war in Ukraine continues today, in a way that Putin can never have intended.

He was looking for a swift victory. Instead, the conflict has already lasted longer than the four years that the Soviet Union fought Hitler.

While the parade remembers that great victory, which Putin is desperate to be associated with, his era in the Kremlin will be remembered for making war, not overcoming evil.

James Rodgers is the author of The Return of Russia: from Yeltsin to Putin, the story of a Vengeful Kremlin (2026). He is a former correspondent in Moscow, Brussels and Gaza

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