Watching the ritual May Victory Day parade as a correspondent in Moscow a couple of decades ago, I was always struck by its distinctive mix — a noisy exhibition of modern military power but also a day that harked back to past victories, with Second World War veterans waving forlorn carnations as tanks thundered up the main boulevard (workmen have to head out early the next day to fill in the potholes left behind).
Now the same parade, after a year of war in Ukraine launched by the Kremlin on its next-door neighbour, has turned into a sour and defensive affair, the ceremonials scaled back to fend off security risks. A sombre Vladimir Putin yesterday attempted to recast his conflict as a battle to protect Russia from an aggressive West and Volodomyr Zelensky’s “military regime”.
The truth, of course, is that Ukraine is militarised because it has been attacked by Moscow’s forces, not the other way round.
The narrative is that war mode is the new normal. Talk of quick victory has melted away as fast as the sludgy snows of a Moscow spring. Much of the Russian leader’s address seemed to offer a never-ending slog against some specific Western interests (Nato) and some odd if predictably nasty ones — the railing against so-called “globalising elites”, with its anti-Semitic overtones and the cruel verbal assaults on gay and transgender people.
At the the same time , some of Putin’s allies, such as the ruthless mercenary forces in the Wagner Group, spoiled the party with snarky criticism of the accident-prone Kremlin-annointed military leadership. Their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed Russian army units had fled their positions in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut because of “stupid...criminal” orders from senior military commanders.
In many ways, this sense of stalemate and infighting is good news for Ukraine and a validation of its allies’ cohesion in supplying battlefield technology and equipment, while staying away from being too closely identified with a “proxy war”. But as James Cleverly, the low-key but often shrewd British Foreign Secretary put it this week, assessing the chances of a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive to push back Russian forces: “We have to be realistic. This is the real world. This is not a Hollywood movie”.
However odd it may seem (and war is always a mix of the predictable and the bizarre), Russia and Ukraine now confront similar questions from opposite standpoints — namely, what would be enough for each of them to be willing to end the fighting?
Putin’s dream of running Ukraine as a puppet state from Moscow is gone. So how can he square its rhetoric of an existential battle for survival with an outcome which might also end up with partition or some piecemeal outcome promoted by the Chinese and vaguely acceptable to Washington? I asked a leading defence official in the Biden administration how long he felt the “as long as it takes” pledges of support could continue without more precise expectations of what the end-state looks like. “Until the fall (autumn),” came the surprisingly precise reply.
This does not mean the US will abandon Zelensky. But it does explain a number of absences — like the refusal of the administration to commit to retaking Crimea from Russian control.
As my defence acquaintance put it, “the terms of the conversation will sharpen” about how long and on what conditions the war receives unconditional support from its allies. That is one reason for the present sense of haste in Kyiv and attempt to make as many gains as possible by summer — and the dogged message from Moscow that it can tolerate a long haul and losses.
Like many supporters of Ukraine as a beacon for the freedoms from fear and aggression that we take for granted, I would wish it a swift and decisive victory on a decisive scale — and perhaps something like that will come to pass.
But Cleverly is wise to dispel the impression that good news from the front is a foregone conclusion. By implication, he is reminding us of the hardest question, which will become more insistent next months. If the core aim is a defensible, secure and economically viable Ukraine, what proportion of its post-1990 territory needs to be secured to call it a win? A lot depends on getting that right — or at least, less than wrong.
Anne McElvoy is Executive Editor at Politico
