Forty-eight hours before Vladimir Putin walks out to the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing stand, the parade he will preside over has no tanks, no cadets, and no Xi Jinping. The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed on April 29 that "no military hardware will pass through the square" in connection with the "current operational situation." [1] Cadets from the Suvorov Military Schools, the Nakhimov Naval Schools, and the cadet corps will not march. [2] Last year, when the 80th anniversary brought 27 foreign leaders to Red Square — including the Chinese, Brazilian, Cuban, and Venezuelan presidents — the parade fielded over 11,500 troops and more than 180 military vehicles, including the T-90M, the T-80BVM, the Yars intercontinental ballistic missile, and the Geran-2 drone. [3] This year, by Wednesday's count, exactly two foreign heads of state are publicly committed: Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko, who has attended every Victory Day under Putin, and Slovakia's Robert Fico, who will lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and meet Putin briefly but told reporters at the European Political Community summit he will not attend the military parade itself. [4] Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia closed their airspace to his plane; Czechia opened its airspace to let him cross.

The paper's Tuesday reading treated the parade-strip as the structural fact and the unanswered May 8-9 truce offer as the diplomatic frame around it. Today the structure has hardened. The Kremlin's foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov has confirmed that Lukashenko, Tokayev of Kazakhstan, and Japarov of Kyrgyzstan will be present alongside Fico — four CIS-and-Slovakia leaders against last year's twenty-seven, with no formal European presence. [5] Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has announced his attendance. The Kremlin will release its full guest list on the eve of the parade, and the Insider counted only four confirmations on the public record on April 29. [5] Modi of India declined the invitation in advance.

Xi Jinping is the absence that says the most. A year after he stood beside Putin reviewing nearly 200 tanks, Xi has not announced attendance and is now eight days from a Trump-Xi summit window in Beijing in which Iran-war mediation sits high on the agenda. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked Wednesday why this year's hardware was withdrawn, framed it as a defensive posture against a "terrorist threat" from Kyiv, noting that this is "not an anniversary" parade and that "the parade will take place, but in a reduced format." [6] The framing strains. Russia held a 75th-anniversary parade in 2020 with full hardware and a 70th in 2015 with hardware. The configuration this year is not the off-anniversary calendar; it is a budget admission and a target-management decision dressed in the language of a "special date."

What the slimmed parade tells you, if you sit at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center as Alexander Gabuev does, is that the Iran war has eaten what the Ukraine war left of Russian inventory. [3] The 2026 Aramco production envelope, the Strait of Hormuz disruption, the dividend pipeline running roughly $6 billion lighter year-over-year — the same fiscal weather that pulled the Saudi Public Investment Fund out of LIV Golf has also stopped the Russian column from rolling past Lenin's tomb. Natia Seskuria of the Royal United Services Institute told Reuters and AP that the equipment absence "signals a degree of vulnerability rather than strength, because even last year, Russia demonstrated a range of new tanks and drones in front of invited world leaders." [3] John Foreman, a former British defense attaché to Moscow, told Reuters the decision reflected both battlefield pressure on the Russian Army and the calculated risk of presenting an attractive target for Ukrainian deep-strike drones. [7] The Defense Ministry has compressed Navy Day in St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, and Vladivostok in 2025 for the same reason. The Belgorod regional government building came under drone attack on the previous Victory Day morning. [8]

Inside Russia, the slim parade is being absorbed unevenly. The exiled commentator Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter now on Moscow's "foreign agent" list, posted on Telegram that the only logical reading is "afraid of mutiny — or has all the equipment burned up in Ukraine?" [7] The state press treats the Su-25 tricolor flyover as the showstopper. The Kremlin has not yet announced whether Putin will use the parade itself to declare a Ukraine truce; Peskov said Thursday that "no specific decision has been made" and that any cessation date "will be decided by the president." [6] Volodymyr Zelensky responded to the Trump call's truce offer within hours, saying Ukraine had received no formal request and would observe its own truce, then determine further actions after Russia's own actions on the ground. [9] By Tuesday, his office was reporting that Russia had already disrupted the announced regime.

The Moscow Times, before its forced relocation to Amsterdam in 2022, used to call this configuration a "parade of pariahs." [3] The 2026 version reverses the geometry. Last year the riser was crowded and the column was complete. This year the riser holds two confirmed friends and the column is empty. The visible cost of two open-front-line wars and a sovereign-wealth fund pulling back from international sport is the absence of the very objects — the T-90M turrets, the Suvorov cadet corps, the Yars launcher in tow — that the parade has used since 2008 to project a state. The riser is the receipt. The flag stand half-empty at dawn on May 9 will be the thing the country sees on its televisions, even before Putin speaks. The Soviet legacy that Putin claimed for himself, in the analyst's phrase quoted in The Moscow Times last spring, is now being asked to perform without its props. [3]

What changes by Saturday morning is uncertain. Lukashenko has already said in Moscow last weekend, ahead of the parade, that "Russia is ready not just for a ceasefire but for a peace deal" — language that sat without elaboration in Belarusian state media and without acknowledgment from Kyiv. [10] Fico's brief sit-down with Putin will produce a photograph the Czech-and-Slovak press will read as a diplomatic concession; Bratislava will read it as a domestic-political gesture. The Kremlin will read the day by what it does not show. The 81st anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany — a date Putin's regime has used to bind its current war to the Great Patriotic War — will be staged as a foot column, a flyover, and an empty hardware lane. The propaganda value is in what is missing. The strategic message is too.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow