How Victory Day became a battleground: Russia’s shrinking celebrations and global echoes of WWII memory

On May 3, an unusual procession moved through Washington, D.C., beneath the monuments of the American capital. Several hundred people carried portraits of Red Army soldiers while children waved Soviet flags. A live orchestra performed wartime songs at the World War II Memorial. The Russian embassy had filed the permit, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police provided an escort.

Russian state media celebrated the event as proof that, with the return of Donald Trump, historical truth had returned to America. One organizer told Russian state television:

“We love, respect Russia, honor the memory of our heroes.”

Similar marches took place in Paris, Amsterdam, and Busan. In Berlin, authorities announced that Soviet flags, Russian symbols, and military songs would once again be banned near Soviet war memorials during May 8 and 9 commemorations.

Russia’s Victory Day marred by fear and scaled-back celebrations

But in Moscow, Victory Day itself appeared haunted by fear. For decades, May 9 has been Russia’s most sacred annual political ritual, binding victory, patriotism, and state power into a single language. This year, however, the Kremlin canceled the traditional procession in the Russian capital, moving it online. Military equipment was removed from the parade, and mobile internet access across Moscow was intermittently shut down in the days leading up to May 9.

Spectator numbers in St. Petersburg reportedly dropped from thousands to just a few hundred. The Victory Parade in Kaliningrad was canceled entirely. Russian media outlets published extraordinary reports about Vladimir Putin retreating deeper into protected bunkers amid fears of Ukrainian drone strikes and assassination attempts.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry even warned foreign governments to evacuate diplomats from Kyiv before May 9, threatening massive retaliation if Ukraine targeted the celebrations with drones.

Ukraine’s unexpected gesture amid the tensions

Then came another extraordinary twist. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly “allowed” the parade to proceed. In a deliberately tongue-in-cheek decree issued after negotiations around a temporary ceasefire, Zelensky formally excluded Red Square from Ukraine’s operational strike plans for the duration of the celebrations. He even listed the exact geographic coordinates of the square itself.

How WWII memory became a global political tool

Watching it all unfold, one question lingered: Do empires collapse more easily than the systems of feeling they create? The Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago, but the architecture built around victory, sacrifice, and historical grievance survived it. This myth-making has stretched across borders, diasporas, and rival political projects, evolving into a transnational political language through which governments, activists, diasporas, and ideological movements compete over legitimacy, victimhood, and belonging.

At Coda, in our Rewriting History series, we have tracked how the remembrance of World War II became central to Vladimir Putin’s machinery of legitimacy and repression. Soon after he came to power, Russian public culture became saturated with stories of the Great Patriotic War. Watching Russian state television often felt as if the past were being weaponized in real time.