EU flight bans and Ukrainian drones have made two of Russia’s VIP guests look silly on the eve of a monumental parade.
The only EU leader going, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, almost didn't make it after the Baltic countries closed their airspace to him on Thursday (8 May).
Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić also had to land and wait in Baku for two hours due to the Baltic states’ restrictions and to Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia, which grounded 60,000 civilian air passengers on Thursday.
It left Fico and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov fulminating on the airwaves.
“This is a deliberate attempt to thwart my visit to Moscow,” said Fico on Facebook.
Lavrov said: “I abide by the rules of television and censorship so will not express what I [really] think about it ... of course, it's a disgrace”.
But Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna said “use of Estonian airspace to go to Moscow for the 9 May parade is out of the question,” calling it a “propaganda event”.
The annual parade used to commemorate the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
But Russian president Vladimir Putin has turned it into a glorification of his war against Ukraine and the wider West, which is why most EU leaders have boycotted it since his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
He is hosting 29 foreign leaders this year, including those from Brazil, China, Cuba, DR Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
“The celebrations are clearly slanted towards building Russia’s image in the Global South as a country actively fighting back against the influence of what the Russians call the ‘collective West’,” said John Lough, from the Chatham House think-tank in London.
Putin has also called a unilateral three-day truce for his celebration, which includes a re-enactment of the storming of the Reichstag by Russian soldiers on a giant replica.
Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy declined the Russian truce as a gimmick, theoretically putting Putin’s VIP guests, including Chinese president Xi Jinping, at risk from more drone strikes on Moscow on Friday.
But for Jamie Shea, a former senior Nato official, it would be a PR mistake for Kyiv to bomb Putin’s big day.
“The Russians deserve their day of [WW2] commemoration as well, whatever we think of Putin and his regime. It would be a political mistake for Ukraine to try to disrupt it,” he said.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in the war.
And Kyiv had already made its point by grounding the 60,000 passengers on Thursday, Shea added.
“Nicely embarrassing for Putin,” he said.
An EU diplomat also said the Fico and Vučić flight snafus meant “Putin’s parade has already been compromised”.
“The whole world was laughing at Fico,” the diplomat said.
And Putin had twisted the meaning of the WW2 parade so much, he had made it into an “aberration … the whole Western world should be trolling him,” the EU source said.
Meanwhile, for Chatham House’s Lough it was “surprising” that Russia's top EU ally, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, didn’t go.
Shea, the ex-Nato official said: “He [Orbán] may be happy to let Fico take the political flak for once”.
One EU diplomat called Fico’s trip a “pure provocation”, but another one voiced apathy over both Fico and Orbán’s Putin ties.
“I don’t care much … he [Fico] can go where he wants to. Plus, it is not like he is hiding his pro-Russian stance [anyway],” the European diplomat said.
A third diplomat said the EU couldn’t do anything against Fico or Orbán, but could make Vučić, whose country still aspired to join Europe, pay a price for siding with Moscow.
“Can’t see how Serbia’s [EU] accession process progresses without a fundamental realignment,” the EU diplomat said
Russia also managed to attract a handful of far-right and far-left MEPs to Moscow, in its campaign to project EU disunity.
At the same time, top EU officials and more than 24 EU foreign ministers are planning to meet in Lviv, western Ukraine, also on 9 May, to unveil plans for a new international war crimes tribunal aimed at putting Putin behind bars one day.
And all that left the 72-year-old Russian leader and his Global South guests to spend hours watching ageing Russian tanks roll by.
“Things that look good on the parade ground are the big old Soviet era tanks and missile launchers. They make a lot of noise and are highly visual … but their relevance to modern warfare is not the same,” said Shea, who now teaches war studies at Exeter University in the UK.
“Modern Russian military equipment will stay on the Ukrainian front line. So I don’t expect there will be much to capture the attention of the Western military attachés attending the parade,” he said.
This article was amended to clarify that it was the Soviet Union that lost 27 million people during World War II.
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Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.