May 9, 2022 – what a victory celebration it should have been! Just imagine: Vladimir Putin, Gatherer of the Russian Lands, greets the victorious returning troops on Red Square. Ukraine shattered as a country, its capital Kyiv taken in a surprise attack, its government exiled. Along with the battlefield triumph, Russia also celebrates its ruler, who boldly changed the course of history, triggering the biggest celebration since the 1945 parade held to celebrate the victory of Stalin's army over Nazism.
Given the events of the past few months, that was likely what Putin had been hoping for. But the reality has turned out rather differently. On May 9, Russia will again celebrate Victory Day with a military parade, as it does every year, but the army that will parade through Red Square this time will be a humiliated one. Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's armed forces are no longer the feared power they once were.
Putin's troops have experienced a military and moral fiasco in Ukraine. Poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and poorly equipped, they have failed against an enemy thought to be much weaker. They had to retreat from their positions near the capital city of Kyiv. And what had been planned as a blitzkrieg has turned into a tough slog, a war of attrition.
Finally, discipline and morale of the Russian troops is also catastrophic, as evidenced by the many crimes that have been committed against Ukrainian civilians. The rapes, looting, torture and executions have created the image of a force that cares little about other people's lives, and doesn't think highly of themselves. It did not help that the soldiers were sent into a war basically without preparation and based on a false political assumption: The assumption that the Ukrainian population would welcome the troops as liberators.
It is not only Putin's army that has suffered a defeat in Ukraine. His intelligence services have also revealed weaknesses. This applies particularly to the FSB foreign intelligence agency, which is responsible for reconnaissance in Ukrainian territory. It should have prepared Putin and his advisers for the fact that the majority of Ukrainians would be hostile to the invaders. "But to say something to the leader of Russia about Ukraine that he doesn't like, apparently no one was willing to do that," says intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov. "For the last seven years, there has been an atmosphere of selective repression in the country – and senior FSB officers are among those being detained."
