read moreĪsked on Friday whether the parade would be overshadowed by the conflict, which Russia calls a "special military operation", and concerns about a mobilisation, Peskov said: THE SHADOW OF WARĪhead of Monday's parade there has been speculation that Putin will use his address to formally declare war on Ukraine, or to order a general mobilisation to help reinforce Russia's campaign - suggestions that the Kremlin has dismissed. It was also the first time the parade had been televised live to a worldwide audience, through Russia's RT channel. ![]() ![]() Mechanised units took part in the 2008 parade for the first time since 1991, and that year there was a fly-past of fighting planes for the first time in any parade on Red Square since 1957, according to the TASS news agency. Since 2008, Victory Day parades have become a muscular display not only of marching battalions but also of Russia's latest weaponry, including warplanes, tanks, and nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles. "The people of Europe are in eternal debt to the Soviet Union," Vasily Golubev, 85, made a Hero of the Soviet Union for helping Leningrad to resist the Nazi siege, said at a Communist-sponsored rally in Moscow on the day of the 1997 parade. NATO has said there is no plan to admit Ukraine, but that it is for Kyiv to decide whether to apply. That expansion still rankles with Putin, who cites what he says is NATO's intention to admit Ukraine as a direct threat to Russia and one of the reasons for Russia's invasion of its neighbour on Feb. To rub salt in the wound, the Western NATO alliance was expanding into the countries of eastern Europe that had been part of the Soviet Communist military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. They were rich in nostalgic splendour, at a time when Russia's military, ravaged by post-Soviet economic upheaval, had become a shadow of its former self. Russia's first elected president, Boris Yeltsin, made Victory Day parades an annual event from 1995 onwards.
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