Why was Putin so depressed at his Victory Day parade?

Vladimir Putin woke up today before his Red Square military parade and celebratory speech facing a hard reality:  his army is losing the war in Ukraine.  It’s bad: on Saturday, Russian forces were forced out of Kharkiv, blowing up bridges as they retreated across the Russian border.  Here’s a hint about how bad that is:  you don’t blow up bridges when you intend to retake ground you’ve lost.  You blow them up to keep the opposing army from slaughtering you as you get away.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city.  It’s only 25 miles from the Russian border.  Remember all those satellite photos of Russian forces massed across the border back in January and February?  A lot of them were located in the region between the Russian city of Belgorod and the Ukrainian border.  Military experts were predicting that Russian forces, led by a massive assault with tanks and self-propelled artillery and rocket launchers, would sweep south and take Kharkiv in a matter of days.

Now it’s 75 days into the war, and Kharkiv is still in Ukrainian hands.

Putin had already suffered his biggest defeat a few weeks ago:  his forces ended their attack on the capital city of Kyiv and were driven back across the border into Belarus, where they had massed before the war began in February.  Then it was announced that Russia would concentrate its efforts on Eastern Ukraine, including Kharkiv, Izyum, Luhansk and Donest.  What happened to that offensive?  Well, a week ago, General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian Army’s Chief of Staff, was wounded by shrapnel in the leg and had to be flown back to Russia to be treated.  He was hit during a Ukrainian attack on a Russian command center in Izyum that killed another Russian general, Andrei Simonov and more than 200 Russian soldiers, according to Ukrainian military officials.  Gerasimov had been personally dispatched to Ukraine to “change the course” of the flagging Russian invasion, according to a Ukrainian military source quoted by the New York Times.  Simonov was the 10th Russian general killed since the beginning of the war. 

More than a quarter of the 120 Russian battalion tactical groups originally committed to the invasion of Ukraine have been so badly depleted by losses of military hardware and soldiers they have been rendered ineffective and removed from the battlefield, according to a report from Britain’s Ministry of Defense. 

Now the retreat from Kharkiv is forcing the Russian military to recommit those forces to retaking that city rather than reinforce its army further to the East, which has been stalled in its attacks in the Donbas.  The only Russian front in the war that even comes close to looking like a victory is in the southern port city of Mariupol, which Russian bombardment has largely reduced to rubble.  There are still Ukrainian holdouts occupying a steel plant on the city’s waterfront, but Russians over the last few days have tried to show they have taken Mariupol by sending soldiers around to replace street signs in Ukrainian with signs in Russian script and restoring “monuments to the Soviet period” around the city, according to the New York Times.  The buildings along streets with the signs in Russian script have been almost completely destroyed, as has the museum where statues are being re-erected.  All of this was done in preparation for the Victory Day celebrations.

In fact, the only skill the Russian army has shown over the last 75 days of war is for blowing up buildings, including hospitals and children’s schools, in Ukrainian cities.  On Sunday, a Russian airstrike destroyed a school being used as a bomb shelter for civilians, including women and children in the eastern town of Berestove.  It was one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since Russia’s bombing of the theater in Mariupol which killed at least 600 civilians. The Russian military is laying waste to Ukraine’s urban infrastructure and killing civilians.  That’s what they’re good at.

Putin’s big Red Square Victory Day parade was to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II.  That victory was achieved by Stalin’s army largely by sacrificing Russian human beings, millions of them. The Russian Ministry of Defense lists 8,668,400 military deaths suffered during World War II.  American and British military historians estimate that Russia lost between 11 and 12 million soldiers and more than 7 million civilians during the war.  Russia itself admits that 2.6 million Russian soldiers were left disabled after the war.

In the summer of 1944 between late June and August in battles in western Ukraine near Lviv and further north into Belarus, the Russian army lost more than 180,000 killed and 400,000 wounded or sick or missing.  During the offensive that year in Estonia, Russia lost another 100,000 soldiers killed and 380,000 wounded.  That’s just two battles along a front that from 1941 until the end of the war was never less than 2,000 miles long.

That’s what Putin celebrated today in Moscow, the slaughter of nearly 20 million Russian people in victory over Nazi Germany.  The New York Times reported that Putin’s speech was the one “that the Russian people were most likely to see, since it came during the televised Victory Day parade,” and is the first major address Putin has made since the “fiery” recorded speeches he made just before the war.

The May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow is when Russian leaders traditionally surround themselves with medal-bedecked generals, strut their stuff and show off their military hardware and flex their war-making muscles.  But with more than 60 percent of his military committed to the war in Ukraine, Putin “made no call for new sacrifice or mobilization, no threat of a nuclear strike, no stark pronouncement about an existential war with the West,” the Times reported today.  “Instead Mr. Putin, speaking on Russia’s most important secular holiday, delivered a message for the broader Russian public: that they could keep on living their lives.”

He's lost and he knows it.  According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has lost more than 20,000 soldiers and countless tanks and other armored vehicles since the beginning of the war.  Other estimates of Russian losses are closer to 15,000, but either number is extraordinary.  There have been recent reports in Ukraine of Russian soldiers throwing down their weapons and fleeing the battlefield – in effect, deserting in the face of the enemy.  The four great measures of a military’s effectiveness are esprit de corps, good order, discipline and the will to fight.  Russia’s army has not shown much of any of these essential elements of military prowess. 

Putin doesn’t have wave after wave of soldiers to throw into battle to overwhelm Ukraine’s much smaller army.  Putin may admire Stalin, he may even think he’s Russia’s new Stalin, but he doesn’t have anything even approximating Stalin’s army, and he seems to lack Stalin’s savage bloodlust.  He’s not calling for a general mobilization of Russia to defeat Ukraine, and his economy is beginning to reel under Western sanctions.  Even if he wanted to completely reconstitute his army and reequip it with modern tanks and jets and artillery and rockets he couldn’t do it, because he has been cut off from the computer chips and motherboards modern military equipment demands.

On top of everything else, Putin’s big parade in Red Square came at the end of the week that the European Union announced a total ban on importation of Russian oil by the end of the year.  There goes what’s left of Russia’s economy.

Victory Day indeed.