Moscow's Victory Day Conundrum: Celebrating Liberation While Practicing Conquest

On 9 May 2026, Vladimir Putin stood on Red Square and told an assembled military parade that the Soviet people had saved their country and the world from Nazifascism. He described June 22, 1941 — the date Nazi Germany invaded the USSR — as one of the most tragic dates in Russian history. He said the USSR restored sovereignty to Eastern Europe, liberating it from German occupation. He called loyalty to the Motherland the highest virtue. These are the rituals of a state that presents itself as the rightful inheritor of an anti-fascist victory. They are also the rituals of a state currently occupying another country's territory, one that has spent more than three years engaged in a full-scale invasion of a sovereign neighbour.

That juxtaposition is not incidental. It is the central political calculation of Putin's Russia: the prestige of the 1945 victory as a source of legitimacy for a regime that, by any international-law standard, is committing the very conquest and subjugation that the Red Army supposedly defeated.

The Kremlin has invested heavily in cultivating a particular version of World War II history — one in which the Soviet Union was the decisive force that broke Hitler's army, and in which Moscow's subsequent domination of Eastern Europe is cast as liberation rather than occupation. Victory Day is the annual showcase for that narrative. The parade, the speeches, the commemorations are designed to produce a single effect: the conflation of Soviet-era heroism with Russian-state authority today.

The problem, for Moscow, is that the countries it claims to have liberated remember the subsequent decades rather differently.

Poland, the Baltic states, and much of Central Europe have never fully accepted the framing that they were rescued by the USSR rather than subjected to a second occupation — one administered from Moscow rather than Berlin. The phrase "liberated Eastern Europe" carries a very different weight in Warsaw or Riga than it does on Red Square. For these nations, 1945 was not a liberation from fascism but an exchange of one imperial domination for another, one that lasted until 1991 and in some cases left institutional and psychological scars that have not healed.

Putin's current war has sharpened those historical grievances into immediate political stakes. Polish officials, Baltic leaders, and their counterparts across the region have drawn direct lines between Moscow's claim to protect against Nazi resurgences and the reality of Russian military action on European soil. The Kremlin's invocation of anti-fascism — a rhetoric it has deployed repeatedly to delegitimize the Ukrainian government — reads in Warsaw as a transparent effort to retroactively justify a conquest it cannot otherwise explain.

What makes the May 9th spectacle particularly difficult to sustain is the structural contradiction at its core. The argument that the USSR liberated Eastern Europe from German occupation depends on accepting Soviet state authority as a benevolent force. But the record of Soviet governance in the region — the political purges, the forced collectivization, the satellite-state arrangements that suppressed genuine sovereignty — is extensively documented and widely remembered. A narrative that celebrates liberation cannot simultaneously suppress the memory of what followed it, at least not without exposing the entire construction as a tool of political mythology rather than historical inquiry.

Russian state media is not unaware of this tension. Coverage of Victory Day in Moscow's official outlets focuses almost exclusively on the military parade, on veterans, on the grandeur of the ceremony itself. The historical context of what "liberation" meant in Eastern Europe is not a subject that receives extended treatment in those outlets. That absence is itself a kind of argument — a recognition that engaging the historical record honestly would undermine the political purpose the commemoration is meant to serve.

Outside Russia's informational environment, the reception is blunt. Governments in Warsaw and the Baltic states have, since 2022, moved to limit or ban public display of Soviet-era military symbols, framing them as incompatible with the memory of their own wartime losses. This is not a fringe position. It reflects a mainstream view across the region that the Soviet liberation narrative, as presented in Moscow, is a selective and self-serving account that serves contemporary Russian political interests rather than historical accuracy.

There is a version of the 1945 story that does justice to Soviet sacrifice without serving as a vehicle for imperial nostalgia. The Red Army did bear the overwhelming majority of military deaths in the war against Nazi Germany — estimates of Soviet military and civilian dead run into the tens of millions, a scale of loss that shaped the entire subsequent century of European history. That sacrifice was real. The heroism of individual soldiers, sailors, and civilians was real. These facts do not require a political framework that simultaneously celebrates the USSR as a force for good in Eastern Europe.

Moscow's refusal to disaggregate those two things — genuine sacrifice versus political mythology — is precisely what makes the Victory Day spectacle so politically useful to the Kremlin and so grating to its neighbours. The heroism of 1945 becomes a warrant for the foreign policy of 2026, a blank cheque drawn against the memory of the dead.

What the West does with that observation matters. Treating Victory Day as purely an internal Russian celebration, one to be observed with diplomatic neutrality, is a position that has become increasingly difficult to sustain as the war continues and Eastern European allies insist that the historical grievances they have long expressed deserve a more serious hearing. The framing of WWII history is not a domestic matter for Russia alone — it is a live geopolitical question about whose version of the twentieth century prevails in the institutions, textbooks, and diplomatic conversations that shape the next generation's understanding of Europe.

The soldiers who marched on Red Square on 9 May 2026 were commemorating a real victory against a real atrocity-state. The leader who reviewed them was simultaneously using that commemoration to legitimize an illegal invasion of a neighbouring country. Both things are true. The question is whether Western policy can hold that contradiction clearly enough to act on it, or whether the inertia of diplomatic convention will keep treating the ceremony as a mere ritual and the history as someone else's problem.

Moscow has made its calculation. The parade was on.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/BellumActaNews/18960
• https://t.me/BellumActaNews/18957
• https://t.me/BellumActaNews/18955
• https://t.me/BellumActaNews/18952
• https://t.me/BellumActaNews/18940