When Vladimir Putin gives his Victory Day speech on Monday, his war against Ukraine will be in its 74th day.
As the Russian president ordered his troops over the border on February 24, he thought Kyiv would be in his hands within the week.
Instead, part of his army has been forced to retreat and a more limited campaign to annex the east of the country has made slow progress.
Russia’s military is weakened and the Kremlin has resorted to hiding the scale of its losses – estimated to be at least 15,000 by UK military intelligence – from its people.
On Monday, like every year, tanks will roll through Moscow, troops will salute the country’s leaders and fighter jets will streak across the capital’s skies.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles will be paraded through Red Square as Mr Putin and his generals look on, a macho show of strength beloved of the hardmen in the Kremlin but which usually goes unnoticed to the wider world.
This year will be different.
Preparations have been under way for weeks and, though fewer weapons than usual will be on display because they are being used in Ukraine, no expense will be spared.
The Z symbol will serve as a reminder throughout the ceremony of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The crude marking used to distinguish tanks sent into Ukraine has become a pro-war emblem and adopted by pro-Kremlin warmongers.
As the invasion continues, this year’s Victory Day parade takes on a totally new meaning.
Will the Russian president use it as a platform to move the war into a new, bloodier phase – perhaps bringing him into direct conflict with the West?
Why is Victory Day so important to Russia and Putin?
On November 7, 1941, Joseph Stalin stood in Red Square and spoke to the troops gathered before him.
Exactly 24 years after the October Revolution had swept away the Tsar and introduced communism to Russia, the new empire was under siege.
Nazi Germany’s forces were within 20 miles of where the Soviet leader stood as he waved to passing tanks, watching them proceed directly to the frontline.
Many of those who marched through Moscow on their way to battle did not return.
Three-and-a-half years later, less than a fortnight after Adolf Hitler had taken his own life in a Berlin bunker, the Third Reich collapsed and the Russia stood on the cusp of becoming one of Europe’s superpowers.
Soviet forces were instrumental in defeating the Nazis and the country paid the highest price of any nation involved in the conflict (estimates vary but as many as 27 million people soldiers and civilians were killed).
They were not all Russians. Though the centre of the Soviet Union bore the brunt, each republic suffered horrific losses of life, including Ukraine, which suffered a higher death rate as a percentage of its pre-war population than anywhere else in the eastern bloc.
Nazi Germany signed a surrender declaration on the evening of May 8. It was already midnight in Moscow, so the occasion is marked on May 9, becoming a public holiday in 1965.
As communism’s influence in Russia waned, commemorations of the October Revolution became less important, while the patriotic attachment to Victory Day grew, playing a similar role as Remembrance Day in Britain or Memorial Day in the US.
For decades, it has also served as a key propaganda set piece for the Russian government, whose official home is the Kremlin, the sprawling medieval complex which overlooks Red Square where the parade reaches its crescendo.
But the event does not only serve to remember the dead – it is an instrument to project a message to the living.
Mr Putin uses the occasion as a show of strength, overseeing proceedings surrounded by his generals, watching the tanks, troops and nuclear missile launchers roll past him.
World leaders are invited on special anniversaries but a British prime minister has not attended since John Major in 1995, nor has a US president visited since George W Bush in 2005.
Why is this year’s Victory Day so crucial?
This year more than any, Mr Putin – who is expected to give a speech – will look to harness the propaganda potential of the event and speak to two audiences.
The first is at home. The Russian president and his mouthpieces in the media are engaged in a daily struggle to keep public opinion onside.
Established independent news is largely non-existent in Russia, its last remnants bullied into silence since the Ukraine invasion.
Mr Putin has framed the invasion as an operation to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine and protect Russian speakers in the east of the country, who he has falsely claimed have been subjected to genocide.
Describing the invasion as a ‘war’ has been outlawed and it must be publicly referred to as a ‘special military operation’, with the threat of imprisonment for those who speak out of turn.
Though there has been dissent, protests have struggled to take off in the face of brutal police oppression and the information vacuum created over more than 20 years of Putinism has ensured opposition is stifled.
The second audience the Russian leader will speak to is the rest of the world.
He will use his address to continue his efforts to frame the conflict as part of a wider struggle against Nato, which has supported Ukraine with arms and whose members have hit Russia’s economy and key individuals with sanctions.
Mr Putin and his allies have accused the West of provoking the conflict and have used airstrikes to try and disrupt shipments of weapons reaching Ukrainian soldiers in recent days.
What could Vladimir Putin say?
The president’s address, the central part of the parade, will be the most eagerly watched speech Mr Putin has ever given.
It’s clear what he won’t say: any chance of him announcing a reduction in hostilities or reviving the peace talks which have been frozen for several weeks seems remote.
Instead, Western observers believe there are two main lines the speech may proceed along.
The first is that Mr Putin will try and declare some sort of victory, probably involving the city of Mariupol.
Russian forces have near-total control of the southern port city and have ramped up efforts this week to defeat the last remaining band of Ukrainian soldiers holding out in a huge steel plant.
The city has seen the most brutal fighting of any large settlement since the war began.
Its mayor has previously claimed a puppet leader installed by invading forces is under orders to clear its streets of rubble and dead bodies in time for May 9.
Its complete capture would theoretically allow Mr Putin to claim he has established an unbroken land connection between Russia and territory in the Donbas region and Crimean peninsula held by pro-Moscow forces since 2014.
But, given the thousands of Russian soldiers killed and economic damage sustained in recent months, this does not amount to much of a victory – and certainly doesn’t equate to the ‘liberation’ of the east of Ukraine.
There was a tacit admission from pro-Moscow Donetsk People’s Republic head Denis Pushilin in late April that a celebration is premature, announcing his own region would delay any parade until ‘the complete victory and the expansion’ of his breakaway territory to the historic boundaries of the eastern oblast.
With little to show for his costly and bloody invasion, some in the West fear Mr Putin may go down a second route and declare all-out war against Ukraine.
By ditching the ‘special military operation’ fiction, the Kremlin would be able to impose martial law at home, call up reserves and institute more economic measures to fund the campaign.
Among those who hold that opinion are British defence secretary Ben Wallace, who told LBC last week: ‘He’s been rolling the pitch, laying the ground for being able to say, “Look, this is now a war against Nazis, and what I need is more people”.’
Russia has only used a portion of its service personnel so far, with around 180,000 of one million contract soldiers and reservists deployed.
Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate Chief Kyrylo Budanov said on May 2 he believes the Russian government has already covertly begun preparing for a wider mobilisation.
This, some fear, could be accompanied by much stronger threats against Nato countries supporting Ukraine, pushing the world closer to a wider conflict.
Any announcement presaging a prolonged war will heighten fears it will spill over into direct clashes between Russia and the West, a terrifying prospect because of the devastating nuclear warheads hoarded on both sides.
Mr Putin may push his country closer to a Third World War – at least in rhetoric – based on the assumption that hardships at home and bloodshed abroad will be more readily accepted if they are framed as part of a grand Cold War-style struggle, rather than in pursuit of a local victory.
MORE : In the court of Tsar Putin: The key Kremlin figures behind the Ukraine war
Extreme propagandists on Russian state TV have been banging that drum for several weeks, manically declaring a new World War is already under way and gleefully speculating about the outcomes of a nuclear showdown.
Only the Russian president knows what he intends to say and how far he is willing to go to get what he wants in Ukraine.
His words will be poured over in Moscow, Kyiv, London and Washington, and as Russia marks the end of the Second World War, by accident or design, Vladimir Putin could edge the planet closer to a third.
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