Russia is holding its postponed Victory Day military parade on Wednesday despite steadily rising coronavirus infections, as Vladimir Putin seeks a popularity boost in the run-up to a referendum on extending his time in office.
The parade celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany and has grown to outsize proportions in the years since Putin came to power at the turn of the century.
On 1 July Russians will vote on amending their country’s constitution to allow Putin to run twice more for president, potentially extending his stay in the Kremlin to 2036,
Online voting will begin less than 24 hours after an estimated 14,000 Russian troops, as well as tanks, artillery, and aircraft, traverse Red Square in a patriotic display of the country’s military prowess.
The preparations for the parade have involved complex considerations over Russia’s hurried exit from coronavirus shelter-in-place measures to accommodate the crucial political season.
The Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, appeared to yield to pressure to end the city’s lockdown earlier this month but he has urged spectators to avoid crowding the streets to catch sight of the passing military hardware. “It’s better to watch it on television,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any crowds, there shouldn’t be spectators there.”
Access to Red Square and Putin will be limited, with journalists kept to a press centre and visiting participants in the parade quarantined before the event. Dozens of second world war veterans, now more than 90 years of age, have been sequestered in sanatoriums outside Moscow for two weeks before the event. “They are in wonderful conditions there,” a Kremlin spokesman said.
Russia reported 7,425 new coronavirus infections on Tuesday, bringing the total reported infections to just shy of 600,000. There have been 8,359 confirmed deaths – a figure widely seen as unrealistically low.
Before the parade, Putin authored a 9,000-word article in the conservative American magazine the National Interest that accused the west of rewriting the history of the war and sought to defend Soviet participation in the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
This week, Putin opened a vast new military cathedral, one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in the country, where the presentation of the war as national religion is made all but explicit, complete with steps forged from scrap metal from Nazi military tanks.
“For us, the citizens of Russia, the memory of the great patriotic war, of all those who fought and died, who brought the victory closer by all means, is absolutely sacred. It is always with us, it gives us strength – strength to serve our country, moral precepts, from which we have no right to retreat and will never retreat,” Putin said in a speech at the cathedral outside Moscow on Monday, a day of mourning marking Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died in the war.
Foreign leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping will not attend this year’s parade as hoped, due to the coronavirus. Meanwhile, more than a dozen large Russian cities have cancelled parades or will hold them without any crowds. The governor of the Pskov region, where an elite airborne division is based, said he would not hold a parade so as “not to risk the health of the people and, above all, the health of our dear veterans”.
The governor of Crimea, the peninsula annexed from Ukraine in 2014, cancelled and then reinstated a parade, saying he had re-evaluated the decision after speaking with Moscow.
Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician who publishes investigations into corruption, accused the government of spending tens of millions of pounds on a parade that was mainly desired by the political elite. “Everyone in the country understands that all this madness is being held for one person,” he said. “This parade has one viewer. He’s sitting in his bunker.”