Triumphal Russian holiday marks potentially perilous moment for Ukraine in war

In a war like this one, what does winning even look like? That’s a question Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to answer, at least implicitly, when his country marks one of its biggest and most bombastic patriotic holidays, Victory Day, on Monday — a highly choreographed celebration of Moscow’s military might that awkwardly coincides this year with a smaller neighbor’s improbable defiance in the face of a withering 10-week assault. “There’s no victory to announce,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at University College London. “So he’ll have to proclaim one all the more loudly.” The war on Ukraine — the “special military operation,” as the Kremlin dubbed its Feb. 24 invasion — can in no way be said to have gone according to plan. Putin’s armies have killed thousands, flattened once-vibrant cities, sent more than 5.7 million people fleeing into exile and inflicted billions of dollars in damage to Ukraine, a country of 44 million people that became a sovereign nation more than three decades ago when the Soviet Union imploded.

But in these weeks of warfare, Putin’s once-vaunted military has failed to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, or depose its government. Russia has also suffered the ignominious sinking of a flagship missile cruiser and suffered military casualties likely exceeding those of the Soviets’ signature debacle in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The invasion of Ukraine has re-energized the NATO alliance, pummeled the Russian economy and plunged the country’s 144 million citizens into a degree of isolation not seen since the chilliest days of the Cold War. Russia, which encountered little meaningful resistance when it seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and fomented a separatist war in Ukraine’s east, had by all accounts hoped for a swift victory and speedy installation of a puppet government when its troops and tanks rolled across the borders. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has achieved near-Churchillian stature as a wartime leader, and Western dignitaries arrive near-daily in Kyiv, lavishing cash, weaponry and expressions of support on Zelensky’s government.