It was a more low-key Victory Day parade than in the past and, finally, without any big announcements by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
With Russia’s war in Ukraine in the background, unleashed more than two months ago, soldiers and vehicles paraded through Moscow’s Red Square —without the traditional plane parade, canceled due to the weather— to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II.
The fight continued this Monday in Ukraine, especially in the separatist region of Donbas – where pro-Russian rebels rose in 2014 -, which has become the new axis of the war. However, the Russians took a moment to commemorate the past.
Below is a summary of Putin’s main phrases this Monday in Moscow.
Putin’s speech on Victory Day
- “Today they are defending what their grandparents and great-grandparents fought for.”
- “Our duty is to do everything possible so that the horror of a global war does not happen again.”
- “The NATO countries didn’t want to listen to us … they had very different plans and we could see it.”
- “Everything indicated that a clash with the neo-Nazis, the Ukrainian nationalists, who the United States and its junior partners were counting on, would be inevitable.”
- “The danger was increasing every day. Russia preemptively repelled this aggression. This was the only correct decision, and it was a timely decision. The decision of an independent, sovereign and powerful nation.”
- “I am addressing the soldiers deployed in Donbas. They are fighting for the homeland, for their future, so that the lessons of World War II are not forgotten. There is no place in history for the punitive divisions of the Nazis.”
- “True love of the fatherland is what guided the militiamen led by Minin and Pozharsky [durante la guerra polaco-rusa]those who attacked the enemy on the Borodino field [durante las guerras napoleónicas] and fought the enemy around Moscow and Leningrad, Kyiv and Minsk, Stalingrad and Kursk, Sevastopol and Kharkiv [durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial]”.
- “We bow our heads in memory of our comrades-in-arms who died in the just fight for Russia.”