Pallid Vladimir Putin raises spectre of a forever war

Victory parades in Moscow are intended to be a celebration of military might and political resolve, a moment when Russia pays respect to those who fought on the battlefield. This time around it was a nervously abbreviated spectacle, presided over by a joyless retired KGB officer who seemed less concerned with polished swagger than with the need to conceal the depleted state of his nation’s armed forces and the Kremlin’s internal divisions.

Surface to air missiles were rolled out yesterday in Red Square and there was plenty of goose stepping – but no sign of modern tanks, no fly-past by advanced fighter jets, which are being kitted out with extended range glide bombs. No Pantsir air defence systems. It’s not just that the kit is deployed elsewhere, in preparation for the well advertised Ukrainian counter-offensive, but also because Putin doesn’t want to surrender intelligence to the West.

A single tank on display in Red Square during the Victory Day military parade. Picture: Moskva News Agency / AFP.

Russia, he said, was in a real war, a civilisational one. Even the march of the immortal regiment, a traditional ceremony allowing Russians to hold up pictures of dead Second World War relatives, was cancelled. The reason: fear that Russians who have lost their sons in the past 14 months of the Ukraine invasion would turn it into an anti-war protest.

The Kremlin leader’s paranoia about the battles of the coming months has become the determining factor in Europe’s most important hot war in 80 years. If the Ukrainians were indeed responsible for the recent drone attack on the Kremlin then Putin’s angst would perhaps be justified. More plausibly, it could have been a Putin-engineered test to check Moscow’s dense air defence system ahead of yesterday’s parade. The fact that it ended up as a bit of a cock-up will merely add to Putin’s sense that the war is slipping out of his control.

The victory parade, big in Cold War days and revived by Putin, was supposed to support a national cult of victory against fascism. Known as “pobedobesie” in Russian, this fetishised fascist-crushing permeates the state narrative and has found a way into primary school curricula.

Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Victory Day military parade. Picture; Sputnik / AFP.

But to apply the supposed lessons of the Great Patriotic War to the current war against Ukraine you would have to believe that a big, bloody, successful battle, a 21st-century Stalingrad, would lead to a turning point – 2023 would have to mimic 1943 when Stalin’s armies started to notch up a string of successes. Stalingrad was followed by successful offensives against the German forces in Kursk, Kharkov (now Kharkiv) and liberating Kiev (now Kyiv). Military breakthroughs led to a string of strategic triumphs for Stalin.

But there is to be no Putingrad to match Stalingrad. The Kremlin seemed to have granted Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine that symbolic significance and it looked as if it could fall as early as last January.

The Ukrainians have hung on, however, and kept their supply chains open. Knowing the importance to Putin of a victory there, the gangsterish head of the Wagner mercenary corps, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has threatened to withdraw his men from the firefight unless Moscow immediately sends more ammo. Some is on the way, so the ruthless Wagnerians may carry on shooting.

Fireworks explode behind the Moscow State University during the Victory Day celebrations. Picture: AFP.

The promise of victory made by Putin to the Russian people looks hollow. It seems he cannot produce a knockout blow on the battlefield and he was unable to engineer a change of government in Kyiv (he called the Zelensky leadership a “military regime” yesterday. There could be a strategic victory whereby he convinces the global south he has the guts to take on the West, its guns and values. But this is going to make life complicated for China, which Putin needs to keep on side. And the Russians themselves show no great interest in global leadership.

Then there’s the “victory” of a peace deal perpetuating Putin’s control over Crimea and greater autonomy for the eastern Ukrainian provinces. Even that cannot be sold as victory because it means tension with what has become a heavily armed Ukraine. Enforcing Ukrainian neutrality is now impossible.

On offer, then, is only a forever war. There is still no general conscription, but digital call-up has complicated draft-dodging. Army recruiters have been trawling mosques and migration offices in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, offering sign-up bonuses and fast-track citizenship for those who serve six months. The aim: to drum up 400,000 new volunteers to fight in Ukraine.

Victory eludes Putin, though not so much because of low recruitment numbers as because of the absence of clear, declared goals. Is Ukraine to be partitioned or occupied as a whole? The Kremlin dithers, makes meaningless rotation of generals.

Russian cossacks march on Red Square during the Victory Day military parade. Picture: Moskva News Agency / AFP.

Igor Girkin, a shadowy former FSB officer and now a military blogger, reckons too much has already been messed up for Russia to emerge victorious. “Now we have to think about how to preserve the state, the community and the people in a situation of impending military defeat,” he says in his latest post.

Ukraine’s hope is that this kind of defeatism is spreading among squabbling factions, both nationalists and liberals, who are losing faith in Putin’s pallid leadership. The war can be won, Kyiv believes, by nudging Putin into reckless decisions that disconcert his generals and his oligarchs. Soon he will be looking for scapegoats for his unwon war. He may believe 2023 is indeed 1943: hard but successful, culminating in strategic triumph. In fact it might be more like 1937, Stalin’s year of purges, a year of bad dreams.

The Times