President Vladimir Putin said Russia would achieve its strategic goals in Ukraine as he insisted the country was united behind his war.
“Truth and justice are on our side,” Putin said Friday at the May 9 Victory Day military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. “The entire country, society, and people support the participants” of the war in Ukraine, and “that strength of spirit has always brought us only victory.”
Russia “will always rely on our unity in military and peaceful affairs, in achieving strategic goals, in solving tasks in the name of Russia, its greatness and prosperity,” Putin told thousands of troops assembled on Moscow’s Red Square.
Putin spoke after US President Donald Trump on Thursday called for a 30-day ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine to allow for talks on a lasting peace deal. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he’s willing to abide by a 30-day truce, Putin has so far resisted a halt to fighting while insisting on Russia’s maximalist demands in return for a settlement to the war that’s now in its fourth year.
“Hopefully, an acceptable ceasefire will be observed,” Trump said in a social media post. “If the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions.”
Putin made no reference to Trump’s call for a ceasefire during his speech. The Russian leader announced a three-day truce from May 8-10 for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Ukraine didn’t commit to that pause and said it couldn’t guarantee the security of foreign officials attending the Moscow parade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping sat next to Putin on Red Square during the ceremony. Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi were among leaders from more than 20 countries including Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam and former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan who also watched the annual parade of troops and military equipment.
Xi told Putin during a chat over tea in Moscow on Thursday that China hopes “a fair, lasting and binding peace deal that is accepted by all parties involved” could be reached through dialogue to end the war in Ukraine, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Xi didn’t elaborate on what a possible deal should look like.
Positions far apart
The White House has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress for a deal after Trump sought unsuccessfully to bring an end to the war within the first 100 days of his return to the presidency in January. While top US officials previously threatened to walk away from negotiations unless an agreement is reached soon, Trump said Thursday he’d “stay committed to securing Peace between Russia and Ukraine, together with the Europeans.”
Russia has demanded full control of four regions of Ukraine that it only partly controls and international recognition of its sovereignty over the territories. It wants a halt to Western arms supplies to Kyiv and says it won’t accept any NATO forces in Ukraine.
The US has proposed broadly freezing the conflict along current front lines, handing Russia effective control of the territory it occupies. The Trump administration is also willing to recognize Crimea, which Putin seized in 2014, as Russian, Bloomberg reported in April, and has accepted Russian calls for Ukraine to abandon its goal of joining NATO.
A meeting between Putin and Trump is getting closer, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told state television Thursday. Trump said later that he doesn’t expect to meet Putin in Saudi Arabia during his trip to the Middle East next week.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was the only European Union leader to attend the military parade. He was forced to take a longer route to reach Moscow when the Baltic states refused overflight permission for his government plane to travel to Moscow.
Chinese troops marched alongside Russian soldiers on Red Square on Friday, the latest demonstration of the “no limits” friendship that Xi and Putin declared shortly before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine began. Armies from 13 countries were taking part in the parade, according to Ushakov.
The Soviet Union’s victory at the cost of 27 million lives in what’s known as the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945 is a shared memory of families across the former Communist superpower, including in Ukraine and Russia. The Kremlin has increasingly sought to co-opt that common history to rally public support for Putin’s war on Ukraine, by falsely casting the government in Kyiv as dominated by “fascists” and presenting Russian soldiers as descendants of the troops who fought the Nazis.
That’s even as it was Russia that sparked Europe’s worst conflict since WWII by invading Ukraine and occupying part of its territory.