By Galina Korol | 2025-05-14

KYIV -- Victory Day, long rooted in solemn remembrance, has taken on a darker meaning in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

What was once a tribute to the defeat of Nazism now has become a ritualistic display of power meant to justify war, intimidate the occupied and reinforce Kremlin control.

"This is madness. I don't even know how to comment on it. It's truly terrible," Petro Andriushchenko, director of Ukraine's Center for the Study of the Occupation, told Kontur. "A spectacle built on bones. You cannot go lower."

'They do not control society'

In Ukrainian territory seized by Russia, preparations for May 9 celebrations began months in advance. In Kherson province, occupation authorities formed organizing committees as early as winter, laying the groundwork for a series of propaganda events.

Coercion, not enthusiasm, drove the participation, said Yuriy Sobolevsky, first deputy chairman of the Kherson Provincial Council. Authorities attempted to stage mass rallies, but turnout was sparse.

"[The occupation authorities] tried to bring people out onto the streets en masse, but they failed," Sobolevsky told Kontur. Most attendees were government employees and recipients of benefit payments whose livelihoods depend on the occupation regime.

Officials monitored attendance closely. "Based on lists of who was there, who was not there, the reasons why a person was not there. Quite strict," said Sobolevsky.

For many residents, the safest response was to stay home.

They avoided public events out of both aversion and fear, Sobolevsky said.

"First, people have no desire to create and take part in this mass gathering. And second, people are frightened," he explained. "They are afraid of armed incitements, because the Russian occupation authorities have repeatedly fired at crowds in order to then blame the Ukrainian military."

Even in Mariupol, a city that Russia devastated, authorities managed a turnout of only government employees and benefit recipients.

Members of the Espanola Battalion, an irregular Russian military unit that includes fans of various Russian football teams, cosplayed as spectators for an auto race in Mariupol that nobody from the local population wanted to watch.

The occupation authorities concentrated their efforts on Mariupol and Melitopol, attempting to stage celebratory events in both cities, but those efforts failed to generate any real public participation or sense of festivity, said Andriushchenko.

In occupied Berdyansk, efforts fared no better. Plans for a grand Victory Day celebration never materialized. The occupation authorities had largely shifted their Victory Day efforts -- their so-called "1945 victory mania" -- to minor local events and online formats, Viktor Dudukalov, deputy chairman of the Berdyansk District Council and a member of the Ukrainian military, said.

"This is, overall, a welcome development, because in reality [the occupation authorities] do not control the situation. They do not control society," he told Kontur.

'A bet on children'

While the occupation authorities struggled to mobilize adults for Victory Day events, their efforts to engage children proved more effective.

The authorities pushed propaganda even into kindergartens, encouraging children to don military-style caps, wave Soviet flags and listen to idealized stories about veterans, said Sobolevsky. His account is consistent with events at the Ivushka daycare and kindergarten in Henichesk, a town in Kherson province occupied since the early days of the war.

Photos shared on the center's page on Russian social media show children wearing garrison caps and St. George ribbons, symbols now closely tied to Russian militarism. The program included songs about the 1945 victory and about soldiers and poems about the war.

"With these Soviet and Russian narratives, they are essentially making zombies out of the children, and in my opinion, this will have very negative consequences in the long term," said Dudukalov.

At another Ivushka kindergarten, in the village of Novooleksiivka, children were filmed dancing in front of a banner declaring "2025 is the Year of the Defender of the Fatherland."

The soundtrack featured a strikingly militarized message: "Soon I'll grow up, and I want to be a military chemist. I make bombs from dough. The Russian army is waiting for me."

'Militarization is tantamount to a war crime'

Events like these, often organized by teachers, may constitute collaboration with occupying forces -- a crime under Ukrainian law. In certain cases, lawyers say, they could even qualify as war crimes.

"The militarization of children is not just words. It is their future recruitment into the army," Andrey Yakovlev, a lawyer and analyst with the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, told Kontur.

This form of indoctrination is prohibited under international humanitarian law, particularly when it likens the defeat of Nazi Germany to Russia's ongoing war effort, he said.

"They draw parallels and actually justify the 'special military operation,'" said Yakovlev, using the Kremlin's euphemism for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. "They are committing a war crime."

To underscore the long-term impact of such ideological programming, Yakovlev pointed to boys who were just 7 to 10 years old when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Now, he noted, some of those same children have joined the Russian military.

Dudukalov witnessed this dynamic firsthand in 2022 while passing through a Russian checkpoint en route from occupied territory to Zaporizhzhia. The guards were 19-year-old servicemen from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

"I knew from their language, from their appearance, that they were not Russians at all. They were actually from Donetsk," Dudukalov recalled.

"And I said to my wife, imagine it. He's 19 now ... Donetsk had been occupied for eight years at that time. While he was a child, they programmed him so that at age 19 he would be ... knowingly fighting for that shameful army."

By recasting May 9 from a solemn remembrance of the dead into a celebration of military strength and loyalty, Russia, he argued, is actively molding a generation of children under occupation into its future soldiers.