The Russian President once again justified the triggering of his offensive in Ukraine and accused Westerners of wanting to “cancel the millennial values of Russia”.
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Monday, May 9, for the first time in his long reign, Vladimir Putin was alone in the presidential gallery placed in the Red Square, surrounded by his generals and veterans, to kick off the celebrations of 9 -Mai marking the 77
The Kremlin had indicated that no foreign head of state had been invited, saying to see in this first a non-event. But the challenge was to avoid an even more insulting rebuffs than during the 2015 edition, when the refusals had accumulated, a year after the annexation of Crimea and in the midst of the Donbass.
Isolated but combative Russia is the message that Vladimir Putin made during his speech. The Russian president largely drawn the parallel between the exploits of Soviet soldiers during the Great Patriotic War “of 1941-1945 and the conflict in Ukraine.” Today as yesterday, you are fighting for our people in the Donbass, for the Security of our homeland, Russia, he launched to the soldiers deployed in Ukraine, a country whose name it did not once pronounced. So that there is no place in the world for executioners and the Nazis. “
” Faced with an unacceptable threat “
He then gave the departure of the Moscow military parade, a demonstration of force and always grandiose event on which the shadow of the conflict in Ukraine strongly hovered. Main singularity, the parades in Moscow and in the provinces promised to be less supplied than in previous years, with around 35 % of equipment and men engaged less than in 2021, according to the estimate of Forbes magazine.
If no official comments have been made on this subject, this variation is the consequence of the commitment or destruction of many units in Ukraine, helicopters and armored vehicles. The fleet was deprived of its traditional nautical parades of Sébastopol, Saint Petersburg and Vladivostok, cancellations which will at least have the merit of not recalling the painful disappearance of the Moskva cruiser and other ships.
In 2021, Mr. Putin had swept eighty years of Soviet and Russian historiography, ensuring that, during the war, “we were alone in front of the enemy”. This year, the Russian president went further. Even if he claims to “honor the memory of all the combatants of the Allied armies”, he accused Westerners of wanting to “cancel the millennial values of Russia”: “such moral degradation has become the basis of cynical falsifications of the ‘ History of the Second World War, encouraging Russophobia, the glorification of traitors, the depreciation of the memory of their victims. (…) We remember how the enemies of Russia have tried to use bands of international terrorists Against us, tried to sow national and religious enmity in order to weaken us and divide us from the interior. Nothing has succeeded! “
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