Russian President Vladimir Putin’s May 9 Victory Day speech was perhaps the most anticipated speech of his career. Nuclear scientists, Western intelligence, European leaders, Ukrainian militiamen, and Japanese bankers, were all waiting amid warnings that Putin could declare an all-out-war, abandoning its pretence of calling the conflict a ‘special military operation’ or launching full mobilisation.
Putin disappointed. He delivered a short 20-minute stump speech seeking to rally his troops — 11,000 of whom gathered on Moscow’s Red Square for the event, as they do every year. Typically there would be more soldiers in attendance, but the Russian President noted the unique circumstances by highlighting that some had returned from the front for the celebration. He sought to tie the fighting in Ukraine to World War II, repeating his blood libel against a Ukrainian government led by Europe’s first post-holocaust Jewish head of state.
But there was no declaration of war. Victory was spoken of as if it was assured, but Putin’s comments centred on the Donbas. Putin again equated the territory with Russia itself, declaring that: “Now as (during World War II), you are defending our people in the Donbas, for the security of our homeland, Russia”. He referred to eastern Ukraine as (our) “own land”.
Some observers may take that as an indication that Putin’s initial war aims to take all of Ukraine east of the Dnieper and along the Black Sea coast have therefore been scaled back.
The clearest message from the President is that he lives in an alternate reality. Or he is at least fully committed to the alternate realities his advisors have created for the Russian people. Putin declared the war one of self-defence, against the West, which he sees as wilfully turning a blind eye to the ‘fascist’ threat he sees in Ukraine. But he did not make any reference to the sanctions his warmongering has wrought, or the costs that Russians will have to bear, excepting a minute of silence for fallen soldiers. The silence was, however, accompanied by a droll drumbeat of war.
He did not differentiate between those who fell in the current war and in World War II. Russians have long been primed by a ‘victory ideology’ regarding the War — one of the few threads of public belief to stretch unbroken over the turbulence of the Soviet collapse, 1990s and subsequent development of the Putinist state.
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