With the Russian military still struggling, Western officials and Ukraine’s traumatized residents are looking with increased alarm to Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9 — a celebration of the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany — that President Vladimir Putin may exploit as a grandiose stage to intensify attacks and mobilize his citizenry for all-out war.
While Russia has inflicted death and destruction across Ukraine and made some progress in the east and the south over the past 10 weeks, stiff Ukrainian resistance, heavy weapons supplied by the West and Russian military incompetence have denied Putin the swift victory he originally appeared to have anticipated, including the initial goal of decapitating the government in Kyiv.
Now, however, with Russia about to be smacked with a European Union oil embargo, and with Victory Day just days away, Putin may see the need to jolt the West with a new escalation. Anxiety is growing that Putin will use the event, when he traditionally presides over a parade and gives a militaristic speech, to lash out at Russia’s perceived enemies and expand the scope of the conflict.
In a sign of those concerns, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace predicted last week that Putin would use the occasion to redefine what the Russian leader has called a “special military operation” into a war, calling for a mass mobilization of the Russian people.
Such a declaration would present a new challenge to war-battered Ukraine, as well as to Washington and its NATO allies as they try to counter Russian aggression without entangling themselves directly in the conflict. However, the Kremlin on Wednesday denied that Putin would declare war May 9, calling it “nonsense,” and Russia analysts noted that announcing a military draft could provoke a domestic backlash.
Still, Russia’s hierarchy also denied for months that it had intended to invade Ukraine, only to do exactly that Feb. 24. So the conjecture over Putin’s intent on Victory Day is only growing more acute.
“This is a question that everybody is asking,” Valery Dzutsati, a visiting assistant professor at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas, said Wednesday, adding that the “short answer is nobody knows what is going to happen on May 9.”
Comments are closed.