Paris | In the past, President Vladimir Putin of Russia has used the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in 1945 to cement his steady militarisation of Russian society, extol the values of heroic patriotism and contrast Russia’s warrior spirit with what he sees as the moral decadence of the West.

This year, he will no doubt try to conjure “victory” from the indiscriminate destruction he has wrought in Ukraine. He will find some justification for a war that has gone far less well than expected against a Western-backed “Nazi” threat in Kyiv that he has invented.