By Kontur | 2025-05-09

On Red Square, tanks rolled, missiles gleamed and more than 11,500 servicemen marched in lockstep. Russia's Victory Day parade was a carefully choreographed message: strength, unity, control.

But just a few hundred miles away, that illusion explodes.

In Ukraine, Russian troops are dying by the hundreds each day. The army advances at a crawl despite enormous costs in lives and equipment. Cities are still being shelled. Civilians are still dying. And the war grinds on, far from the polished symmetry of the parade grounds.

This year's commemoration marked 80 years since the Soviet victory in World War II. This event is woven deeply into Russia's national identity. For many, May 9 remains sacred. But the Kremlin's spectacle also masks a present shaped by attrition, economic strain and quiet grief.

The battles unfolding in places like Bakhmut and Kharkiv have little to do with patriotism and everything to do with staying alive. They are defined by confusion, fatigue and mounting casualties, not by grandiose narratives of former glory.

A parade to manipulate the people

In Red Square, the parade heedlessly pressed on, an annual show of might that papers over the losses of troops and equipment in Ukraine.

"The whole country, society and people support the participants of the special military operation," Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the event, using the Kremlin's euphemism for the invasion.

The parade included more than 130 pieces of military assets, including intercontinental missile launchers, according to The New York Times. The Putin regime tried its best to make the equipment roll-by impressive, but outsiders could see the holes.

The parade included tanks like the T-72 and T-90, which "are very rarely encountered in the [Ukrainian] combat zone ... because an enormous number of Russian tanks have been destroyed," Alexander Kovalenko, a correspondent with InfoResist, told Kontur.

Observers were scornful of Putin's misuse of a tragic but deeply valued history to manipulate his people.

"If this holiday of victory back in Soviet times was a holiday for veterans, for those who fought and won, and at the same time a Memorial Day, now it's a militaristic holiday, a holiday of grandiosity," Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst and director of the Penta Center for Political Studies, told Kontur.

The parade serves Putin's modern-day needs, said Ihor Chalenko, a Ukrainian political scientist and director of the Center for Analysis and Strategies.

"It's not just for showing off a victory over past enemies," Chalenko told Kontur. "It's to emphasize that [Russia has] present-day and future enemies. And that [it] has to unite against them."

Grief behind closed doors

Meanwhile, the grief of a nation whose ill-led men are dying daily in frontal assaults goes on behind closed doors, unseen on Russian TV. Every day, roughly 1,000 Russian soldiers are killed or wounded in Ukraine. That figure includes conscripts barely out of training, men pulled out of prison cells, and volunteers driven by desperation, ideology or the threat of punishment.

For many, their war ends in muddy trenches, under drone fire or in the crumpled remains of a Soviet-era vehicle. Their families, often uninformed of their fate, are lucky if they receive a brief notification.

"Where is my son? What's happened to him?" a woman named Lyudmila Borisova said in a video that was posted to VK, Russia's biggest social network, according to The Times of London.

"Our son asks all the time where his dad is. I have no idea what to tell him," another soldier's wife confided.

These soldiers do not march in Red Square. They are buried quietly, their sacrifice wrapped in secrecy. Their suffering is not choreographed. It is endured.

"The whole country shouts that we don't abandon our own but in reality no one gives a damn," one woman in Moscow told The Times on condition of anonymity. "Very few people know or care how many of our soldiers have died in Ukraine."

Kovalenko of InfoResist stressed that from World War II until the fall of the USSR, the Kremlin never lost as many men in a war as Russia has lost in Ukraine.

The toll of a stalled campaign

The battlefield tells a sobering story. Over the last three months, Russian troops have made minimal progress, capturing an average of just 2.5 sq. miles (6.5 sq. km) per day, The New York Times reported May 8. Meanwhile, the shelling of Ukrainian cities continues, with more than 2,600 civilian casualties reported in the first quarter of the year alone, according to the United Nations.

Russia's economy, constrained by sanctions and reliant on declining oil revenues, is under stress. Inflation is surging, and key industries are struggling to adapt to a war footing. These pressures, while not on parade, weigh heavily in the background.

"I think the decisive factor will be ... the price of oil," said Fesenko the political analyst.

The oil and gas sector accounts for about a fifth of Russian GDP.

"A year or so" of stagnant or falling oil prices could "reduce [Russia's] ability to finance its war against Ukraine," he observed.

A February phone survey by the Chronicles research project found that 54% of Russians say the war has harmed their well-being and daily life, while only 9% saw any benefit. Although 36% reported a direct decline in their financial situation, more respondents cited broader negative impacts.

"This assessment correlates with weak support for the war and less willingness to vote for Putin," Chronicles reported at the time.

Equipment losses

Besides taking stupendous casualties, Russia is watching the methodical attrition of its military hardware. Its army has become a patchwork of aging equipment and improvisation.

Since February 2022, Russia has lost more than 20,000 pieces of heavy military equipment, including nearly 2,600 tanks and thousands of armored vehicles. In their place are retrofitted T-62s from the 1970s, civilian vehicles mounted with machine guns and even motorcycles repurposed for combat.

Sophisticated air cover is often absent. Russian troops face advanced Western-supplied Ukrainian defenses without the logistical support their commanders promised them.

Drone losses are staggering. Russia has invested billions in drone production, aiming for 100,000 units a month. But Ukrainian air defenses down more than 70% of them.

The navy has taken a pounding as well. Ukrainian maritime drones have forced Russian ships to retreat eastward, away from the line of fire. Since the start of the war, Russia has lost about 30% of its Black Sea Fleet. Modernization efforts stalled, and shipyards are behind schedule.

Aviation tells a similar story. Estimates suggest Russia has lost over 300 aircraft, including elite Su-57 fighters and Ka-52 attack helicopters. Lacking air superiority, Russia often grounds these aircraft or relegates them to limited sorties. Russian bases, once thought to be secure deep within the country, have come under drone attack.

And still, the parade marched on. Leaders from about 20 other countries, including China, attended the event -- an effort by Moscow to demonstrate that it remains engaged on the world stage despite Western sanctions.

Yet beyond the spectacle, the world is watching something more telling than fireworks and flybys in formation. It sees the paradox: a government claiming moral righteousness while sending wave after wave of troops to die in trenches, and a military flaunting its strength while cannibalizing its own reserves just to maintain a stalemate.