Russia held its annual Victory Day parade on Red Square on Saturday in a notably stripped-down format, with no tanks, intercontinental missile carriers or heavy artillery rolling past the Lenin Mausoleum for the first time in nearly twenty years. The forty-five-minute ceremony featured a single combat-jet flyover, a video montage of Russian forces in Ukraine projected onto the GUM department-store façade, and a foot column of about ten thousand servicemen.
Most of the omitted hardware is in active service in Ukraine, but officials in the Kremlin attributed the change of format chiefly to the threat of Ukrainian long-range drones. The presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the week that "additional security measures" had been imposed across the city, and air-defence batteries were visible on Saturday on the rooftops of the Rossiya Hotel and the Defence Ministry headquarters on Frunzenskaya Embankment.
For the first time, North Korean soldiers marched in formation past the reviewing stand. Pyongyang has now committed more than 10,000 troops to fight alongside Russian forces in Kursk and southern Donetsk, according to figures published by South Korea's National Intelligence Service in March, and the Saturday appearance was treated by Moscow analysts as a public confirmation that the partnership was now treated by both governments as a long-term alliance.
In a short address from the Mausoleum tribune, President Vladimir Putin invoked the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 to frame the war in Ukraine as part of the same historical struggle. "Victory has always been and will be ours," he said, telling the assembled units that the "great feat of the generation of victors inspires the soldiers" of what Moscow continues to call the special military operation.
No major Western leaders attended. The Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko were seated at Mr Putin's left, with Kim Jong Un's sister Kim Yo Jong representing North Korea on the tribune. Foreign-ministerial guests from Iran, Venezuela and Eritrea were also present, but the diplomatic representation was thinner than at the eightieth-anniversary parade twelve months ago.
Mr Zelenskyy issued what he described in a video address as a "presidential decree temporarily protecting Red Square from Ukrainian strikes" for the duration of the parade — a sardonic gesture that nonetheless reflected the seriousness with which Moscow had braced for an attempt at disruption. Russia had threatened "massive missile strikes" on Kyiv in the event of a Ukrainian operation against the parade. None materialised.