Putin's Victory Day display is a charade, not a parade
President Putin's Victory day parade tomorrow will give a completely false idea of what's actually going on in the Russian armed forces. It's an attempt by the dictator to deceive the Russian population into believing that a great patriotic victory is being delivered, as Stalin genuinely did in 1945.
The reality is that Russia's few remaining modern(ish) tanks, elite soldiers and powerful missiles will be mostly in the parade: on the front line these things are in very short supply. They will play their part in Putin's political theatre, not the theatre of war. The real Russian Army is culminating in Ukraine – a technical term for the point at which an army's efforts start to collapse. Russia is suffering 1000 casualties a day and 1 million in total thus far. Even Stalin would have baulked at these rates of loss. He at least had battle-hardened generals to advise him, but Putin is losing his most senior military experts at an alarming rate, right on his own doorstep.
The Russian tanks now being delivered to the front date from the 1950s and are little more than mobile coffins. These T-62s are even older than the Chieftain tank I first commanded in the late 1980s. We were positioned on the inner German border to oppose the then Soviet hordes, who back then had T-72s and T-80s. Those tanks are now all smouldering hulks in the Donbas. I'm not sure I'd go to war in a Chieftain today even if a Russian commissar ordered me to at gunpoint!
Meanwhile most of the Russian air defences are positioned in and near Moscow protecting the elite, not the Russian troops on the frontline. Even so, Ukrainian drones are already causing chaos in Muscovite airspace. And Russian senior officers are now being assassinated almost within a stone's throw of the Kremlin. It looks rather as though the FSB and National Guards are on the back foot in the covert warfare being waged on Russian soil.
I believe – as I am told, by some western intelligence agencies – that Putin is rapidly running out of military road. He says he will go nuclear, but this is bluster, and each time it is repeated it gets more threadbare. The fact is that he's killed off a million men and bankrupted the country. He seems to think that President Trump is an idiot and will cut the US off from Ukraine and allow it to fall into Russia, but with the minerals deal with Zelensky signed, this would damage US interests.
So, as we look at the shiny tanks and missiles rumbling through Red Square, we should not be fooled as to the state of the Russian Army and Putin's position. Hard military power these days is shown in drones, cyber, space and highly trained and motivated soldiers. It's a charade, not a parade. Let us hope the Russian people get this before it's too late.
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