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.
“Today we do not know what to expect from the enemy,” Haidai wrote on Telegram. “Please go out onto the street as little as possible. Stay in shelters.”
The Ukrainian military also warned of a “high probability” of missile strikes throughout the country as Russia used Victory Day as impetus for a reinvigorated assault.
In Kyiv’s city center, where traffic was light but a few establishments remained open, IT worker Tanya Melnyk said she hadn’t been taking any special precautions in connection with the Russian holiday. Still, she felt on edge.
“It’s constant stress anyway,” the 34-year-old said. “Maybe I’m staying home more during these few days, but I’m not sure it makes me feel any safer.”
Putin was more measured in his speech than some had expected, perhaps out of wariness that either declaring victory in Ukraine or escalating the conflict would send the wrong message.
“Stating victory would make people question, why is the special military operation still happening then?” said Edwards at the University of Warwick. “And war mobilization would show Putin’s failure to be able to bring about victory within the confines of the special military operation. He’s keeping it vague, justifying his goals along the lines of Western humiliation of Russia, notions that NATO was planning a punitive operation in Donbas and the duty of Russia to fight Nazism as their great-grandfathers did in the 1940s.”
In Warsaw, Russia’s ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreev, was doused with what appeared to be red paint thrown by protesters as he visited a cemetery to honor Soviet soldiers who died during World War II. The protesters carried Ukrainian flags and were also covered in red coloring to symbolize those who have died at the hands of Russian forces.
While Russia flaunted its military might in Moscow and other cities, its offensive in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland appeared stalled, with the front lines remaining mostly static, according to military officials and Western analysts.
The Ukrainian military said in a morning operational report that it had repelled half a dozen attacks in the last 24 hours in Luhansk and Donetsk, the two provinces making up the Donbas region that Russia is trying to overrun completely.
Ukrainian forces pressed ahead with a counteroffensive outside the northeastern city of Kharkiv, near the Russian border, the military said. That push has been forcing Moscow to divert forces from elsewhere, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in its latest battlefield assessment.
Ukrainian military pressure has been bolstered by growing Western diplomatic support, including visits Sunday by First Lady Jill Biden to a western Ukrainian town near the border with Slovakia and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Kyiv.
On the same day, the Group of 7 top industrialized countries — the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy — announced a new round of sanctions targeting Russia’s industrial sector, state-controlled media, and Russian and Belarusian finance executives from major banks, including Russia’s Gazprombank.
King reported from Kyiv and Pierson from Singapore.
