ZAPORIZHE, Ukraine (AP) – Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated his country’s biggest patriotic holiday on Monday without much new success on the Ukrainian battlefield, which he can boast of as the war continues in its 11th week. the Kremlin’s forces are making little or no progress in their insult.
The Russian leader watched the Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square, watching troops march in line and military equipment pass by in honor of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.
While Western analysts have been expecting Putin in recent weeks to use the holiday to sound a trumpet for a victory in Ukraine or to announce an escalation, he has done neither. Instead, he tried again to justify the war as a necessary response to what he presented as a hostile Ukraine.
“The danger is growing by the day,” Putin said. “Russia has given a preventive response to aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only right decision. “
He escaped the specifics of the battlefield, failing to mention a potentially key battle for the vital southern port of Mariupol and not even uttering the word “Ukraine”.
In the meantime, intense fighting raged on eastern Ukraine, the vital Black Sea port of Odessa in the south was subjected to multiple missile strikes, and Russian forces tried to finish off Ukrainian defenders, who finished last at the Mariupol steel plant.
Putin has long shuddered at NATO’s eastward entry into the former Soviet republics. Ukraine and its Western allies have denied the threat.
As he had done all along, Putin falsely portrayed the battle as a battle against Nazism, thus linking the war to what many Russians consider their best hour: the triumph over Hitler. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War.
After unexpectedly fierce resistance forced the Kremlin to abandon its efforts to storm Kyiv more than a month ago, Moscow’s forces focused on capturing Donbass, Ukraine’s eastern industrial region.
But fighting there is back and forth, village by village, and many analysts have suggested that Putin could use his holiday speech to portray the victory of the Russian people amid discontent over the country’s heavy casualties and the criminal consequences of Western sanctions.
Others speculate that he could declare the fighting a war, not just a “special military operation,” and order a national mobilization with accustomed reserves to fill the exhausted ranks of a protracted conflict.
In the end, he gave no signal as to where the war was going or how he might intend to save it. In particular, he left unanswered the question of whether or how Russia will gather more strength for an ongoing war.
“Without concrete steps to build a new force, Russia cannot wage a long war and the clock is ticking after the failure of their army in Ukraine,” tweeted Phillips P. O’Brien, a professor of strategic research at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Nigel Gould Davis, a former British ambassador to Belarus, said: “Russia has not won this war. He’s starting to lose it. ”
He said that if Russia did not make a major breakthrough, “the balance of advantages will constantly shift in Ukraine’s favor, especially as Ukraine gains access to growing quantities of increasingly sophisticated Western military equipment.”
Despite Russia’s repression of dissent, anti-war sentiment has crept in. Dozens of protesters were detained across the country on Victory Day, and pro-Kremlin media editors revolted by briefly publishing dozens of stories criticizing Putin and the invasion.
In Warsaw, anti-war protesters sprayed the Russian ambassador to Poland with what looked like red paint when he arrived at a cemetery to pay tribute to Red Army soldiers killed during World War II.
As Putin laid a wreath in Moscow, air sirens resounded in the Ukrainian capital. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his own Victory Day address that his country would eventually defeat the Russians.
“There will soon be two Victory Days in Ukraine,” he said in a video. He added: “We are fighting for freedom, for our children, and that is why we will win.
Russia has about 97 battalion tactical groups in Ukraine, mostly in the east and south, a slight increase from last week, a senior US official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessment. Each unit has approximately 1,000 troops, according to the Pentagon.
The official said that in general, Russia’s efforts in Donbass have not made significant progress in recent days and continue to face strong resistance from Ukrainian forces.
The Ukrainian military has warned of a high probability of rocket fire around the holiday, and some cities have imposed curfews or warned people not to gather in public.
More than 60 people were killed over the weekend after a Russian bombing leveled a Ukrainian school used as a shelter in the eastern village of Bilogorovka, Ukrainian authorities said.
Russia is perhaps closest to victory in Mariupol. The US official said about 2,000 Russian forces were around Mariupol and the city was hit by air strikes. It is estimated that about 2,000 Ukrainian defenders are being held at the steel plant, the city’s last stronghold.
The fall of Mariupol will deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Russia to complete a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, and free troops for battles elsewhere in the Donbas. It would also give the Kremlin much-needed success.
In recent days, Odessa has also been increasingly bombed. Ukrainian authorities said it had been the target of repeated rocket fire on Monday. There were no immediate reports of casualties and authorities did not say what was hit.
The war in the country, long known as the “granary of Europe”, disrupted world food supplies.
“I saw silos full of grain, wheat and corn ready for export,” complained Charles Michel, president of the European Council, in a tweet after visiting Odessa. “This much-needed food has been blocked due to the Russian war and the blockade of Black Sea ports. It has dramatic consequences for vulnerable countries. “
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Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Jessica Fish in Bakhmut, David Keaton in Kyiv, Juras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstislav Chernov in Kharkov, Lolita S. Baldor in Washington and PA officials around the world contributed to the report.
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