The Death of a Neutral Memorial: How the Immortal Regiment Became a Geopolitical Battleground
On May 3, 2026, in two capitals on opposite sides of the Atlantic, people marched with photographs of the dead. In Washington, a group of more than a hundred walked past the White House carrying portraits of soldiers from the Second World War. In Frankfurt, hundreds more moved through the city centre to the accompaniment of "Katyusha," a song that has become shorthand for the Soviet wartime experience. The occasion was the Immortal Regiment — an annual commemoration that began as a grassroots memorial walk in a Russian provincial city in 2012 and has since spread to dozens of countries. What the simultaneous marches in Washington and Frankfurt illustrate, however, is not continuity but fracture. The tradition that was once a vehicle for shared grief has become a proxy for a geopolitical dispute that shows no sign of resolution.
The Immortal Regiment was born in Tolyatti, a car-manufacturing city on the Volga, when a local newspaper and a veterans' group invited people to carry photographs of relatives who fought and died in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The original impulse was personal and non-political — an act of remembrance for families who had lost someone and had no other formal outlet for that loss. The photographs gave names and faces back to a generation that was aging out of living memory. For several years, the tradition spread largely on its own momentum, drawing participants who had no particular ideological affiliation.
The transformation began in 2015, when the Kremlin began to treat the marches as a soft-power instrument. State media started covering them prominently; the Russian government promoted them internationally as a demonstration of shared European wartime heritage. By 2016, Immortal Regiment events were taking place in cities across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America. The portraits being carried were still genuinely personal — photographs of grandparents and great-grandparents who had served — but the framing had shifted. Russia was no longer simply hosting a domestic memorial practice; it was exporting one. Foreign ministries and diaspora organisations connected to the Russian state coordinated logistics in several capitals. The tradition had acquired a geopolitical dimension whether its participants intended it or not.
That dimension became catastrophic after February 2022. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed the Immortal Regiment from a contested cultural practice into an open political symbol. Cities in the Baltic states and Poland banned the marches outright, citing their use as tools of Russian influence and the offensive impossibility of carrying portraits of Soviet soldiers through cities whose populations included both veterans of the Red Army and people whose families had suffered under Soviet occupation. Germany, France, and other Western European countries did not ban the marches, but municipal authorities and civil society groups organised counter-demonstrations and held parallel commemorations that carefully distinguished between remembrance of wartime dead and endorsement of present-day Russian policy. The tradition that had promised to unite Russians across borders in shared grief now served as a reminder of the chasm that the war had opened.
The two 2026 marches — in Washington and Frankfurt — did not occur in a vacuum. They took place against a backdrop of an ongoing conflict entering its fifth year, with no settlement in sight. The participants in Washington and Frankfurt were, in all likelihood, motivated by genuine personal sentiment — a desire to honour forebears who fought in a war that ended eighty years ago. But the geopolitical context has made that personal sentiment inseparable from a political statement. A march that takes place in a Western capital while Russian missiles fall on Ukrainian cities is not experienced by observers as a neutral act of mourning. It is read as a position on the war, whether or not the marchers intended to take one. This is not a misunderstanding on the part of observers; it is a structural consequence of the way the tradition has been used. Once a memorial practice becomes a soft-power instrument, it loses the ability to be non-political. The horse has left the stable and is not coming back.
What complicates any simple narrative of Western fracture, however, is the survival of the tradition in other parts of the world. Immortal Regiment marches continue in parts of Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East — regions where the 1941-1945 war is remembered differently, and where Russia's current war against Ukraine does not carry the same immediate political weight. In those contexts, carrying a portrait of a grandfather who fought against fascism retains its original meaning: an act of family memory, uncontaminated by contemporary geopolitics. This creates an uncomfortable asymmetry. The same tradition that has become a flashpoint in Berlin and Tallinn functions as a legitimate commemoration in Tashkent and Buenos Aires. The question is not which reading is correct — it is that both readings are correct, and they are incompatible with each other.
The deeper problem the Immortal Regiment illustrates is the fate of commemorative culture once it becomes entangled with contemporary geopolitical dispute. Memorial practices have historically existed in a register separate from politics — they are supposed to be about the past, not the present. The Immortal Regiment's collapse into the contemporary geopolitical field suggests that this separation is fragile when one party has an interest in maintaining it and another party has an interest in dissolving it. For Russia's critics, the marches are a present-day political act wearing the costume of past grief. For Russia's defenders and for diaspora communities with no political agenda, they are an act of mourning that should not require a disclaimer. This tension cannot be resolved by the participants themselves; it is determined by the broader context in which the marches take place.
Whether the Immortal Regiment survives as a coherent tradition depends on how the war ends — or whether it ends at all. If a negotiated settlement arrives within the next decade, there will be pressure on all parties to find a language of coexistence, and commemorative practices will need to be renegotiated accordingly. If the conflict freezes into a prolonged standoff, the tradition will continue to bifurcate: genuinely mournful in contexts where Russia retains cultural capital, openly political in contexts where it does not. What will not return is the version that existed between 2012 and 2015 — a grassroots memorial practice without strategic ambitions. That version has been lost, and its loss tells us something important about what happens to cultural instruments once they are appropriated by state power. They rarely come back uncontaminated.
The marches in Washington and Frankfurt on May 3, 2026 were not, in isolation, remarkable events. They were small, peaceful, and driven by sincere personal sentiment. But that sincerity exists inside a political structure that has transformed its meaning. In a different world, carrying a photograph of a great-grandfather who fought against Hitler would require no explanation and carry no implicit endorsement of anything except the universal human act of remembering the dead. In the world that exists, it requires exactly that explanation, and in many cities it will not get one.
This publication covered the Immortal Regiment through the wire lens of post-2022 geopolitical fracture rather than as a cultural tradition in isolation — a framing choice that reflects how the marches have been reclassified by the broader conflict into which they have been drawn.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/ruptlyalert/12432
- https://t.me/ruptlyalert/12431