The Immortal Regiment Walks Washington
On 3 May 2026, the Immortal Regiment procession made its way through the centre of Washington, D.C. Descendants of veterans of the Great Patriotic War — the Second World War, as the rest of the world names it — walked with photographs of their forebears, just as they do in Moscow and dozens of other cities on 9 May. Hours earlier, Russian strikes had ignited a large fire near Chernomorsk in the Odessa region of Ukraine. Two events, one night, two capitals.
The juxtaposition is not incidental. It is the story.
Memory Without a Memo
The Immortal Regiment began as an organic civic ritual in Russia — a way for families to reclaim the personal grief of wartime loss from state pageantry. It grew from a few hundred participants in Tolyatti in 2007 to a million-strong national event by 2015. In that ascent, something shifted. The procession that once felt like it belonged to grandmothers and their grandchildren began to feel like it belonged to the Kremlin. State media adopted its imagery. Official speakers incorporated its language. The photographs of grandfathers became, in effect, props in a narrative about a nation under siege — a narrative that draws a straight line from the blockades of Leningrad to the fighting in Donbas, and casts every subsequent conflict as a continuation of the great patriotic struggle.
That narrative is not invented out of nothing. The Soviet Union suffered catastrophically in the Second World War. No serious account of the conflict minimises that fact. But the narrative is selective. It foregrounds Soviet sacrifice and Soviet victory. It soft-pedals the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It elides the differences between the Russian Federation and the USSR. And, increasingly, it positions Russia's war in Ukraine as a second anti-fascist crusade — a framing that Western governments and media have consistently rejected and that Ukrainian officials describe as historical falsification deployed to justify ongoing aggression.
When the Immortal Regiment arrives in Washington in this context, the cultural act does not float free of the political one. It lands in a specific conversation: one about weapons transfers, sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and the scale of Western commitment to Ukrainian survival. The procession is not a provocation in any organised sense. It is something more awkward — a cultural tradition that Russia partially owns by virtue of historical sacrifice, deployed by people who may have no idea they are amplifying a framing that the Kremlin has spent years constructing for export.
The Diaspora Problem
Russian-speaking communities in the United States are not a monolith. They include Soviet-era dissidents and their children, post-Soviet economic migrants, Jewish families who left in successive waves, ethnic Russians who came after 1991, and — in recent years — a smaller, more ambivalent stream of people who left after the 2022 invasion. These groups share a language, not a politics. They share cultural references, not a loyalty map.
What they do not share, in the main, is institutional infrastructure. Ukrainian-American civil society has spent two decades building the organisations, lobbying capacity, and media presence that made mass demonstrations on American streets possible within days of the February 2022 invasion. The Russian diaspora lacks equivalent structures — partly because the community is smaller, partly because the political fractures run deeper, and partly because Moscow's diplomatic apparatus has never prioritised diaspora cultivation in the way the Kremlin's Soviet predecessor once did.
The result is a peculiar asymmetry. The Russian community in America is largely invisible in public life — which makes its occasional visible moments more conspicuous, not less. When an Immortal Regiment march occurs on Pennsylvania Avenue, it is not a private family ceremony. It is a public act in a public space, and it will be read through whatever frame the moment provides. In May 2026, that frame is war, strikes on Odessa, and a stalled peace process.
The diaspora that organised this event may sincerely believe it is honouring ancestors. It is also, whether intended or not, doing narrative work for a state currently conducting an unlawful invasion. That gap — between personal memory and political effect — is where the most honest analysis must sit.
The Western Misread
There is a counter-tendency worth naming: the tendency in Western coverage to see Russian cultural expressions abroad and immediately reach for the Kremlin-control explanation. When a Russian choir performs in Berlin, it must be soft power. When a Russian ballet tours Sydney, it must be intelligence recruitment. This reflex is not wrong in every case — Moscow has weaponised cultural diplomacy before — but it flattens a more complicated reality.
The Immortal Regiment in Washington is not a Kremlin operation. The organising figures, by most accounts, are members of the Russian-speaking community who have lived in the United States for decades and who maintain cultural ties to a homeland they left — or whose parents left — long before the current conflict. Their attachment to the memory of the Great Patriotic War is genuine. The photographs they carry represent actual grandfathers who fought and, in many cases, died.
The reflex to attribute every Russian cultural act to Moscow's design is itself a kind of abdication of analysis. It treats the diaspora as a transmission belt and nothing more — as people whose cultural impulses are interesting only insofar as they serve or frustrate state policy. That framing is convenient for both sides of the political argument. For those who want to delegitimise Russian cultural presence in the West, it provides a conspiracy of convenience. For those who want to dismiss the political content of Russian cultural memory, it provides an alibi. Neither position is serious.
What the Street Actually Says
The harder truth is that cultural memory is not neutral, and its politics follow the context. The same photographs of the same grandfathers carry different meanings depending on whether they are displayed in a Moscow parade, a Berlin community hall, or a Washington street during an active war. Meaning is not fixed at the moment of creation; it is renegotiated with every new context.
On the streets of Washington on 3 May 2026, the meaning of the Immortal Regiment was renegotiated by the simple fact of where it was happening. A city that is simultaneously funnelling arms to Ukraine, hosting Ukrainian leadership, and applying sanctions to the Russian financial system is not a neutral venue for a Russian cultural commemoration. The event was not a provocation, but it was not aprivate ceremony either. It occupied a contested middle ground that neither its organizers nor its critics have fully mapped.
The question this moment poses is not whether Russian families should be allowed to remember their dead. They should, and they will. The question is what obligations attend a public act of cultural memory during a live conflict. When does commemoration become endorsement? When does personal grief become political statement? The answers are not obvious, and they do not resolve neatly in either direction.
What is clear is that Western audiences, policy communities, and media organisations have not yet developed the conceptual vocabulary to hold these two things apart — the right to remember, and the political effect of remembering in public, at this moment, in this city. The Immortal Regiment walked Washington last night. We are still working out what that means.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/12434
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/12433