This year’s Victory Day military parade was particularly humble, as no heavy assets such as tanks were deployed, and the highlight of the event, the aerial flypast, was cancelled.
The celebration of the 78th anniversary of the victory in the “Great Patriotic War”, or more commonly known as “Victory Day”, where Moscow holds a grand political-military event to extol Russian patriotism and show off its military muscle, left a “weak sauce” taste, given the meager military hardware of relevance deployed.
According to local media, for the first time in many years, 24 other cities canceled their respective Victory Day celebrations, citing security reasons.
The attack against the Kremlin with two drones (the authorship of which was not recognized by Kiev, despite Moscow’s accusations) made even more nervous the Russian high officials, already dissatisfied and conflicted about the management of a “Special Operation”, which turned into a war of attrition.
Even the parade of air units, in which a multitude of Russian helicopters and warplanes usually take part, was cancelled. Possibly, in addition to the above-mentioned security reasons, it may be due to the fact that the Russian Armed Forces must have all their airworthy aircraft deployed on the Ukrainian front and protecting their extensive borders.
