OPINION: A Parade of Shame

Vladimir Putin gave a 10-minute speech in Red Square celebrating the victory in World War II. He did not say the word “Ukraine” once. At least 8 million Ukrainians gave their lives so that Putin could continue to declare victory over the Nazis for 20 years. Today, he does not even want to mention their names.

What kind of man tramples over (at least) 8 million victims to preserve the title of principal heir to victory over the Nazis? An unscrupulous and angry man.

He is furious because the grandchildren of those 8 million dead Ukrainians are currently tearing apart his diabolical fabrication of imperial, invincible Russia, which has the right to all lands that fall into its hands.

As he greeted the loose echelons of his “invincible” army on Red Square, Putin was furious because he knew his troops were losing Bakhmut in Ukraine, which he has been trying to conquer since August last year. He wanted Bakhmut as a gift for May 9.

From the platform, he visibly despised all those who marched in his honor on Red Square. He didn’t want them there, in the streets, but in the trenches around Bakhmut, dying while following the command he issued a long time ago, which still has not been carried out.

He is troubled by the fact that the parade took place. Without the troops marching, it is not a parade. Last year, for the first time, the parade was without aviation, allegedly due to bad weather, which was a lie. This year, the “powerful” Russian air force was given a free day on May 9, as were tank units. All but one trophy T-34 from World War II, with tsarist-communist insignia, as symbols of Putin’s Russia.

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The rest were destroyed or are currently being destroyed by the Ukrainian heirs of the World War II victors. Others are waiting in line to be destroyed. A significant number of tanks probably does not exist because they were never produced, since the money for their production disappeared in the looting corridors of the Kremlin and the “invincible” Russian army during the Putin years.

Instead of aviation, the word “lie” was written in the sky above Red Square, and everyone could see it and hear it in Putin’s speech because he said, “A real war is again being waged against our country.” No war is being waged against Russia. Russia started the war against an independent and peaceful country to occupy and annex it. The fact that Russians are dying does not mean that a war is being waged against them; rather, it means that Russia is an invader and another nation is defending itself from Russian attacks.

The Russian name for that war is also fake – “special military operation” – and whoever dares to say otherwise will go to prison. Even the guests of honor seated on the platform to the left and right of Putin were fake.

Dressed in old uniforms, and wearing numerous decorations, the two old men were supposed to represent the Soviet fighters against Nazism. One had seen war in 1944, in Ukraine, but at the time when the Nazis were expelled. The second was seven or eight years old during the war, but when he grew up, he was an important KGB member during the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

As the only foreign statesmen who attended the parade, friends from abroad, the leaders of former Soviet republics from Central Asia, were also fake. Putin greeted them, although he knew that each of them could not wait to escape the crazy Russian embrace because they knew that Putin would immediately attack their countries if he won in Ukraine.

After anger and lies, Putin’s event was, in the end, a day of desperation. Lonely, isolated, and angry, surrounded by poltroons and thieves, the paranoid leader said that “they want to destroy and dismember” his country. He talked about victories, knowing that there were none, but that his “glorious” army (Putin’s words) was bleeding, dying, and retreating as he talked about its invincibility.

When the tragic balance sheet of Putin’s rule is drawn up one day, somewhere right behind the hundreds of thousands of victims would be his brutal theft of the noble legacy of victory over fascism. History will remember him as a charlatan who tried to abuse that heritage and its millions of victims, and use them as a weapon to conquer and destroy entire nations.

What Putin has been doing with the May Day parades on Red Square is the first of the 14 instructions left to us by Umberto Eco on how to identify the reincarnation of fascism in modern times. The “cult of tradition,” which Putin builds on victory in World War II, asking the nation to bow down to that cult, and use it as a weapon to implement the idea of blood, soil, supremacy, and “historical Russia.”

A messy, lethargic, and at times comical parade on Red Square was Moscow’s depiction of the disintegration of Putin’s mission of evil, which is happening in real-time in eastern Ukraine.

To compare that mission with the victory over fascism 78 years ago is a crime in itself. This is what Putin and Russia were told this year throughout Europe, when the Europeans prevented his ambassadors from laying flowers on monuments to liberators, or when they forbade the display of Russian and Soviet flags. They no longer have a place at any May 9 commemoration.

Let Russia thank Putin for erasing them from the list of World War II liberators. The war in which freedom won over everything that Putin, his army, and his parade of shame represent today.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.