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A Message From the Depths
Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Victory Parade in Moscow o May 9, 2022, as might be expected, brought no intrigue. Some key assumptions, which I risked making in my previous article about Putin’s strategy were fully justified. It is important to note that this parade as a whole was memorable for the absence of several symbolic things that traditionally, especially in recent years, it has always been associated with.
There was no aerial part of the parade, which was canceled completely at the last moment. Aircraft did not fly over Red Square forming an ominous symbol Z because of the weather conditions. But according to some sources, the “doomsday plane” Ilyushin IL 80 Maxdome simply couldn’t take off.
Many types of military equipment, which had always been shown at the parade before, were missing. In particular, the T-80 tanks, 2S35 Coalition-SV self-propelled artillery units, heavy flamethrower systems TOS-1A, Pantsir-S anti-aircraft system. All this military equipment is now actively used in Ukraine.
Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov was absent. Since his last trip to the war zone in Ukraine near Izyum, no one had seen this top Russian military commander.
I was already hoping that I would not see Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu either. But I was deeply mistaken. At exactly 10:05 a.m. the minister drove through the…