Russia celebrates the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat on Friday, celebrating the head of state and the show of the armed forces in Red Square, which was staged as a precursor to global influence, a grand, intimidating display and a final victory in the war with Ukraine.
The annual military parade under the Kremlin walls and towers is expected to be the largest since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This confuses what the government and its cheerleaders use to raise support for the war and become the greatest source of public pride with the more divisive current conflict.
“Our great victory 80 years ago is a new concept, a new story of Russia's current standoffs in the West,” international relations professor Sergei Lyaguzin told Russian state television this week.
But in a gorgeous back, Russia stands on Sheikhor land more than the Kremlin's confident show suggests. Its military is barely moving forward on the battlefield, its economy is sputtering, oil prices, its main exports are declining, and perhaps most surprising, President Trump suggests that President Vladimir V. Putin and his views on war are getting worse.
Putin has refuted these challenges and embraced short-term economic pain and diplomatic set-offs in the hope that his sustainability will ultimately lead to a historic percentage victory, said Alexander Koriandr, a Russian economy expert at the European Centre for Policy Analysis.
“They are sure they are more resilient than the other,” he said in a phone interview. “They believe victory will go to the longest standing side, not the best.”
After first reflecting the topic of Moscow, he even miscried Ukraine for the war – Trump has strengthened his rhetoric about Putin and the Kremlin in recent weeks. Trump has threatened to punish Russian oil buyers, he has sent more advanced weapons to Ukraine, and he has signed a mineral development agreement with Kiev to give the US valuable stake in Ukraine's future security and prosperity.
In Ukraine, Russian troops are making sparse profits and absorbing huge losses. Russian troops have seized an average of 2.5 square miles per day over the past three months, according to calculations by Blackbird Group, a Finland-based military intelligence company. At this pace it will take years to conquer the area Russia already claims to be in the annex.
Rather than changing courses, Putin doubled his policies and demands. He rejected Trump's proposal to freeze combat along the current frontline before beginning negotiations for a peace deal, and called on the US to lift some of its sanctions.
At the same time, Russian troops continue to smash Ukrainian cities, killing or injuring more than 2,600 civilians in the first three months of the year, according to the United Nations. A particularly fatal strike against Kiev last month led Trump to put Putin on a rare public responsibilities.
“Maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, he's just bashing me and I'm going to think I have to deal with it differently,” Trump wrote on his true social platform after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late April.
Despite these challenges, around 12 heads of state, including economic giants China and Brazil's leaders on Friday, are expected in Red Square, highlighting the Kremlin's claim that Western sanctions have failed to isolate widespread Russia. More than 130 military equipment, including intercontinental missile airlines, is expected to pass through Moscow, with soldiers from friendly countries marching with Russian troops, indicating that Russia is not just one that exists as a proxy struggle against NATO.
But on the economy, Russia is injured, lost steam, pressured by oil prices, rapidly reducing the punitive sanctions imposed by the US and its allies in response to foreign currency reserves, record high interest rates and Ukrainian invasion. China, Russia's main ally, is reducing Russian coal and steel purchases to adapt to a trade war with the US.
Russia this month accepted this month's decision, a move that has been curbing oil prices already hit by the impact of Trump's tariffs by a group of major oil exporters known as OPEC+. The benchmark Brent Oil Blend traded at around $62 per barrel on Wednesday.
The decline in oil revenues, which fund around 40% of Russia's government budget, has already hurt the war economy. This month, the Treasury has tripled its forecast for this year's fiscal deficit to 1.7% of domestic production, more than three times its forecast for Russia's major export oil from $70 to $56 per barrel.
Analysts estimate that to cover the rise in the deficit, the government will need to spend the remaining rainy days foreign reserves and gold stockpiles or print more money. The Kremlin considered it, but it was scrapped this week and repealed the proposal to reduce public spending to compensate for the fall in oil prices.
Putin has tolerated the central bank's policy of keeping interest rates at record highs to attenuate price increases. However, the growing chorus of Russian officials and businessmen accused him of accusing interest rates that had been maintained at 21% since October.
Russian consumers have complained about food prices, which rose annually at over 12% in March, but these concerns have not been translated into wider complaints about the government so far, said Dennis Folkov, director of the Moscow-based Independent Polling Officer Levada Centre.
Decades of living with rising wages, government subsidies for the poor and high inflation mean that in a survey conducted recently, like in April, more Russians say their economic situation is improving rather than getting worse, Folkov said in an interview in Moscow.
Its political stability allows Moscow to project national unity at its celebration on Friday, despite a lack of major diplomatic or military breakthroughs in the war. Putin regularly uses Victory Day, Russia's main secular holiday, to inform him that the time is on his side.
Russia's resolve and size proceeded to propaganda messaging in World War II, the German Welmahat, the then European military hegemon, and was supplied by Ukrainian NATO, and trained forces eventually followed.
“These scoundrels have once again united against us,” said Yevgeny, a Russian soldier who fought in Ukraine until his injuries in December. He asked to withhold his last name as he was not permitted to speak to the public.
“We would have been destroyed and wiped out as a nation if we hadn't fought back,” he said. “My grandfather fought. I fought: we are the same.”
Alina Robsina Contributed with a report from Istanbul.
