The New Yorker:

With the President intent on delivering a speedy end to the war, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky are competing to make each other the subject of his ire.

By Joshua Yaffa

On May 9th, Vladimir Putin will oversee a parade in Moscow’s Red Square, commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War, an annual display of military bravado that, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, has taken on more explicit political undertones. The country’s triumph over Nazism is presented as proof of its righteousness in the current war—and of it’s role as a global power. Last year, as intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads rolled across the square, Putin linked the “radiant memory” of those who gave up their lives in the Second World War with “our brothers-in-arms who have fallen in the struggle against neo-Nazism and in the righteous fight for Russia”—that is, Russian soldiers killed in the current war in Ukraine.

This year, the celebrations in Moscow serve another purpose: a way for Putin to show that he is not geopolitically isolated—China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are expected to attend. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has called for a thirty-day ceasefire as a step toward ending the war in Ukraine, a proposal to which the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has agreed. Putin countered with a three-day ceasefire over the May 9th celebrations, a way to protect the Russian capital from Ukrainian drone strikes and to give Trump just enough so that he doesn’t lose interest or, worse, blame Putin for hampering his peacemaking efforts.

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