Russia will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on Friday with the heads of state visiting and a show of armed power in Piazza Rossa, staged as a global, grandiose and intimidating performance, and a president of any triumph in the war against Ukraine.
The annual military parade below the walls and the ceremlin towers should be the largest since Russia has invaded Ukraine in 2022, a commemoration that the government and its cheerleaders used to raise support for war, confusing what could be the largest source of national pride with the much more divisive conflict.
“Our great victory 80 years ago is a new narrative, a new conception of the current stall of Russia with the West,” said Sergei Lyaguzin, professor of international relations, on Russian state television this week.
Behind the pump, however, Russia is found on a more Shakier soil than the Kremlin's sure show suggests. His military are barely advancing on the battlefield, his economy is sputtering, the prices for oil, his main export, are falling and, perhaps more surprising, President Trump is suggesting that his vision of President Vladimir V. Putin and his war is acute.
Putin has played these challenges, accepting short -term economic pain and diplomatic arrest trips in the hope that his persistence will eventually produce a triumph of historical proportions, said Alexander Kolyandr, a Russian economy expert at the Center for European Policy Analysants, a research group.
“They are convinced that they are more resilient than their opponents,” he said in a telephone interview. “They believe that the victory will not go to the side that is the best, but for what remains longer.”
After initially echoed to Moscow discussion points – also by blaming Ukraine for the war falsely – Mr. Trump has hardened his rhetoric on Mr. Putin and the Kremlin in recent weeks. Trump is threatening to punish Russian oil buyers, he is sending more advanced weapons in Ukraine and has made a mineral development agreement with Kiev that offers the United States a precious participation in the future security and prosperity of Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the Russian army is gaining earnings and absorbing losses heavily. The Russian forces seized on average 2.5 square miles per day in the last three months, according to the calculations of a Finnish military intelligence company, the group of black birds. At this rhythm it would take years in Russia to conquer the regions that he has already claimed to attach.
Instead of changing the course, Mr. Putin doubled his policies and requests. Refused the proposal of Mr. Trump to freeze the fighting along the current first line before starting to negotiate a peace agreement and asked the United States to convince the European Union to raise some of his sanctions.
At the same time, Russian forces continued to beat Ukrainian cities, killing or injuring over 2,600 civilians in the first three months of the year, according to the United Nations. A particularly fatal strike on Kyiv last month led Mr. Trump to issue a rare public reproach to Mr. Putin.
“It makes me think that perhaps he does not want to stop the war, he is only touching me and must be treated in a different way”, with further penalties, Mr. Trump wrote on his social platform of Truth after meeting President Volodymy Zlensky at Ukraine at the end of April.
Despite these challenges, about a dozen heads of state, including the leaders of the cheap giants China and Brazil, are scheduled for Friday in the Red Square, underlining the affirmation of the Kremlin according to which the western sanctions of large -reaching have not managed to isolate Russia. More than 130 pieces of military equipment, including intercontinental missilistic vectors, are scheduled to cross Moscow and the soldiers of friendly nations should march with Russian troops, showing that Russia is not alone in what presents as a struggle by prosecutor against NATO.
On the economic front, however, Russia is wounded and loss of steam, under pressure from the drop in oil prices, rapidly reduced the foreign currency reserves, record interest rates and punitive sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The main ally of Russia, China, is reducing the purchases of Russian coal and steel while adapting to a commercial war with the United States.
Russia has accepted a decision taken this month by a group of important oil exporting countries, known as OPEC+, to increase production, a move that has depressed the oil prices already affected by the impact of the rates of Mr. Trump. The reference mixture Brent of reference was exchanged at around $ 62 per barrel on Wednesday, down by about $ 75 when Mr. Trump announced his global rates on April 2.
The fall of oil revenue, which finances about 40 percent of the Russian government's budget, is already damaging its war economy. The Ministry of Finance this month has more than tripled the forecast of the budget deficit for this year at 1.7 percent of the gross domestic product and cut its price forecasts for the main type of exported oil of Russia from $ 70 per barrel to $ 56.
Analysts estimate that to cover the growing deficit, the government should spend its stock on foreign reserves and gold, or print more money, which would worsen already high inflation, now running about 10 percent. The Kremlin took into consideration, but this week he demolished, a proposal to reduce public spending to compensate for the drop in oil prices.
Putin has tolerated the central bank policy to maintain interest rates at the highest record in an attempt to dampen price increases. But a growing choir of Russian officials and businessmen has accused interest rates, maintained at 21 % from October, for canceling growth without cooling prices, an economic and losing economic scenario known as stagflation.
Russian consumers grumble on food prices, which have increased at an annual rate of over 12 percent in March, but these concerns have not so far translated into a wider dissatisfaction with the government, said Denis Volkov, head of the Independent Savoy Center in Moscow.
The increasing wages, government subsidies for the poor and decades of life with high inflation mean that in the surveys conducted recently as more Russian April say that their economic situation is improving, rather than worsening, Mr. Volkov said in an interview in Moscow.
This political stability will allow Moscow to project national unity in the celebration on Friday, despite the lack of important diplomatic or military discoveries in the war. Putin regularly used the day of victory, the main secular holiday of Russia, to convey that time is on his side.
The determination and dimensions of Russia grind the Wehrmacht of Germany, the European military Aegemon at the time, in the Second World War, makes the messaging of propaganda and the forces provided and trained of Ukraine in the end will follow the example.
“These furfants had still united against us,” said Yevgeniy, a Russian soldier who fought in Ukraine until he was injured in December. He asked to hold back his surname because he is not authorized to speak with the public.
“We would have been destroyed, swept away like a nation if we had not reacted,” he said, echoing the unknown justification of the Kremlin for the invasion. “My grandfather fought; I fought: we are the same.”
Labzina Night Reports contributed by Istanbul.