How Russia’s neighbours re-evaluated Victory Day after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine

Several world leaders gathered to lay flowers on Moscow's Red Square on May 9th 2025. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert / wikimedia.org

Few days on Russia’s calendar are marked with more pomp than May 9th, the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies according to Moscow time. On the 80th edition of Victory Day, military vehicles and troop columns rumbled past the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin’s gaze. For the second decade, Russian organizers unfurled massive orange-black Saint George ribbons, the country’s official symbol of the Soviet Union’s triumph in the so-called Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. There were also some wartime differences. For example, Russia announced (then breached) its own ceasefire in Ukraine between May 8th and 10th, while Russian security personnel nervously eyed the skies for drones in Moscow amid a mobile Internet blackout over the week of the parade. The security measures prevented Muscovites from ordering taxis or making smooth electronic banking transfers. The stakes for Russia were high, as President Vladimir Putin hosted BRICS and “Global South” leaders, headlined by China’s President Xi Jinping.

Russia’s manipulation of Second World War memory politics to ideologically justify its invasion of Ukraine is well documented. It is worth noting in 2025 how this memory has evolved over three years of Russia’s full-scale war, and eleven years of armed conflict, against a country that recently celebrated the same public holiday. And while Ukrainian and Russian historical policies are now as bipolar as those of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the other 13 Soviet successor states have adopted varied historical policies that defy simple categorization.

A parade of Russian special forces wearing the ribbon of Saint George. Photo: Shutterstock

From the Baltic Sea to the Tian Shan mountain range, all 15 states share a nominal collective memory of helping defeat the Nazi regime. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 was a point of departure for that memory, and no two states remain identical. So why did some countries follow along with Russia’s narrative longer than others? How did Russia’s neighbours re-evaluate Victory Day when Ukraine, one of their “own” from that existential struggle, awoke to Russian invaders clad in Saint George ribbons?

From “never again” to “we can repeat it”

After their first Second World War victory parade, Soviet troops did not march on Red Square until 1965. Leonid Brezhnev institutionalized May 9th as a public holiday (with a day off) to reinforce Soviet identity. Despite the Soviet Union’s continued military actions and heavy-handed historical censorship, its propaganda focused on peace. The price of war – 27 million citizens killed – was too high to make May 9th a gleeful event. A memorable Brezhnev era Victory Day-themed film, Belarusian Station (1971), has no tanks and no weapons: only ageing comrades-in-arms tearfully recalling the terrible sacrifices of those who did not return. The tone around mass war was “never again”, which was reinforced in the 1980s as a foil to President Ronald Reagan’s “militaristic” foreign policy and the nuclear sword of Damocles.

The Soviet Union held military parades every five years from 1965. Russian President Boris Yeltsin revived them in 1995 as his government grasped for a unifying state ideology in the fragile new federation. He also made it an annual event. Not surprisingly, Putin continued the Soviet fanfare in 2000. But the impetus for making the victory into a sacred myth, quasi-religion, civil religion, or even cult developed over the next fifteen years.

The Kremlin interpreted a string of popular uprisings against corrupt post-Soviet leaders as a domino-like threat to its own rule. Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) had powerful symbols to rally supporters: roses, orange colours, and tulips, respectively. For the statist Russian narrative, the Saint George ribbon filled this need. The orange-black combination referenced a Soviet Medal for Victory over Germany, as well as a Russian imperial military decoration. From 2005, Russian memory policy evolved on divergent tracks. On one hand, honouring Victory Day remained a big tent event for anyone commemorating their veteran family members and even the western leaders who stood on the viewing platform beside Putin. Over 50 leaders attended in 2005, including US President George W. Bush after his visit to new NATO member Latvia. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Poland and Ukraine sent troops to Red Square in 2010.

At the same time, Russian state institutions began systematically erasing the distinction between solemn commemoration of war veterans and support for the nation’s increasingly militant leadership. The first “Immortal Regiment” emerged organically on Victory Day in 2012, when three friends in Tomsk demonstrated with laminated portraits of their Second World War veteran grandfathers. They rejected a ruling United Russia party attempt to take over this new tradition. By 2014 – after pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine had started sporting Saint George ribbons – the Kremlin instructed all local officials to organize Immortal Regiments, which Putin would personally lead in Moscow.

By the end of the 2010s, the Kremlin had successfully monopolized this sacred victory. It mobilized performative participation and approval of the nation’s leadership by using a mixture of government-organized NGOs (the Russian Military-Historical Society, Immortal Regiment-Russia, Youth Guard of United Russia, and Volunteers of Victory, for example) and departments, including the ministries of culture, education, foreign affairs, the Federal Youth Agency (Rosmolodezh), Yunarmiya (the Youth Army), the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo), along with millions of Russian state employees, and sent them into ideological battle. Participation in Immortal Regiments and Victory Day marches became “mandatory patriotism”. Any historian, activist or politician who questioned the official line would be branded unpatriotic.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, at four in the morning, triggered memories of the Nazi surprise attack in 1941 among its survivors. Two years later, Putin hailed the invasion’s combat participants as frontline [frontoviki] “heroes” as thousands of them marched in the May 9th parade: “We commemorate Victory Day under the conditions of conducting the “special military operation”. All of its participants… are our heroes… All of Russia is with you!”

This comparison set a new low point for historical manipulation. Earlier, Putin wrote in The National Interest, crediting Soviet troops with saving the “entire world” with their “heroic, sacrificial fight against the Nazis”. Around 80 per cent of Allied losses occurring on the Eastern Front makes this claim not entirely false. He compared this heroism to doctors and nurses risking their lives in the coronavirus pandemic at the time. But in 2024, the equation of Allied Second World War veterans with contemporary Russian war criminals symbolized May 9th’s evolution from “never again” in the 20th century to “we can repeat it” (mozhem povtorit’) today.

With this process of political appropriation complete, how did Russia’s neighbours re-evaluate the holiday? Let us start our tour in Eastern Europe.

Victory in Europe

Occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Baltic states equate May 9th celebrations with militarism and another 36 years of suppressed statehood. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania abandoned the state holiday in 1990. Lithuania banned Soviet and Nazi symbols together as early as 2008.

Furthermore, these newly liberated European Union and NATO states adopted the European Parliament’s dedication of August 23rd, the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as a day for victims of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in 2009. Both dates became memory rallying points for the European integration narrative.

In 2022, Latvia demolished the Victory Monument in Uzvaras Park, Riga and banned the holiday celebration next year. All three states policed “pro-war” symbols in public.

The Baltic states’ early rejection of 21st century Russian revanchism is not surprising. It was also not the only one in the neighbourhood. In Belarus, despite President Alyaksandr Lukashenka largely mirroring Putin’s May 9th celebrations (albeit in a marshal’s uniform), Saint George ribbons are largely absent. In 2014, when Victory Day propaganda accompanied the so-called “Russian spring” of separatism in Ukraine, Minsk informally banned the ribbon, replacing it with a red-and-green regime-style alternative. Symbology is a miniscule assertion of Belarus’s sovereignty concerns with their erstwhile strategic ally, and an enduring preoccupation for Putin. In a bilateral meeting on April 29th 2025, Lukashenko said, “No one bans Saint George ribbons under any circumstances. Although, I looked into the history, I advise historians to give you all the information [about] Saint George ribbons.” To which Putin responded, “I do not really understand what you said relating to the Saint George ribbon, but I can guess what it could be… I completely agree with you – symbols can be different, what is important is what is behind these symbols.”

Ukraine itself began a memory politics shift to honouring, rather than celebrating, victory that spring. President Viktor Yanukovych embraced a Russian-style May 9th in 2010-13. But after Russian diplomacy and propaganda began portraying the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity as a “fascist coup”, Kyiv slowly embarked on the Baltic path. In 2015, President Petro Poroshenko created May 8th as the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s February 23rd 2022 speech, partially in Russian, demonstrates the absurdity of Russian pretenses: “But how can a people who gave more than eight million lives for the victory over Nazism support Nazism? How could I be a Nazi? Tell that to my grandfather, who went through the entire war in the infantry of the Soviet Army and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine.” Only in 2023 did Kyiv change Victory Day to May 8th.

Moldova, where President Maia Sandu’s pro-European PAS Party narrowly defeated a pro-Russian candidate in November 2024, shows the most contested narrative. May 9th is still Victory Day. But in 2017, when then-President Igor Dodon attended Putin’s parade as the only guest head of state, Moldovan legislators also designated May 9th as Europe Day. Since 2022, the parliament has banned Saint George ribbons and “Z” propaganda, although the pro-Russian Socialist Party (PSRM) still organizes Immortal Regiments that sometimes flaunt the ribbon ban or wear orange and black clothing to avoid it. The primacy of either Europe Day or Victory Day offers rallying points for competing memory politics.

The former Soviet Union’s western states offered the sharpest counterreactions to Russia’s historical policies: even Belarus did not ignore their imperial implications. Let us now cross the Black Sea to the regions with longer histories under Russian imperial control.

Fading memory or geopolitical awakening?

In Armenia and Georgia, May 9th is a public holiday with little state involvement (although Armenia commemorates it as a Day of Victory and Peace). For Tbilisi’s pro-Russian government, however, even the shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion did not lead to formal bans on Russian victory or “Z” symbology. Armenian and Russian soldiers marched together in Yerevan on May 9th 2022. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended parades with Putin in 2023 and 2025 despite Moscow’s criticism of Armenia’s democracy and permissive stance toward Azerbaijan’s forced exile of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. 

At the same time, both Armenian and Azerbaijani memory politics used Victory Day as a building block for their national identities after the Soviet collapse. Similar to Moldova, Armenia “tripled” the holiday by celebrating the May 9th 1991 victory in the Battle of Shushi in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the founding of the Artsakh Defence Army. In a similar breath, Azerbaijan reinterpreted the meaning of “Victory Day”. Since 2020, it falls on November 8th, commemorating Baku’s reconquest of the same city (now renamed Shusha) that completed the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. It relegated May 9th to the background, which has been renamed “Victory Day over Fascism”.

Finishing the tour in Central Asia, we arrive at the default narrative’s most enduring holdouts outside Russia. All five leaders – from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – flaunted Russia’s international isolation by joining Putin’s parade in 2023, 2024 and this year. Yet their policies at home reflect delicate balancing acts between celebrating good relations with Moscow and security concerns from its imperial conquest in Ukraine. 

Kyrgyzstan’s May 9th mirrored Russia the most, with presidents leading public events, troops marching with Russian ones based at Kant airbase, and Saint George ribbons. It truly diverged in 2022 when Bishkek cancelled a traditional military parade, informally discouraged the ribbon, and banned “Z” symbology like Moldova. Tajikistan and Turkmenistan also mirror Russia (Ashgabat held a parade even amid the pandemic), but Dushanbe banned Immortal Regiments in 2017 due to the “incompatibility” of deceased veterans’ portraits with Islamic tradition.

Uzbekistan has tolerated the ribbon only when worn by Russians since before the full-scale war, promoting a flaglike alternative much like Belarus. Tashkent, commemorating May 9th as the “Day of Remembrance and Honour”, was especially muted amid a cooler period of relations with Russia in 2006-2012 (when it also hosted a US base). However, links warmed under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2017.

Finally, Kazakhstan presents the most concern in the region. It banned Immortal Regiments and the Saint George ribbon in 2022, and its own military parade this year was the first in six years. Yet other public gatherings have remained restricted. These moves have reflected both Astana and Kazakh society’s acceleration toward nation-building and concern with Russian imperial designs beyond just Ukraine.

The variation in May 9th politics suggests fading memory in the Caucasus. Georgia is caught in an identity crisis over Russian influence and occupation, while Armenia and Azerbaijan have seen their own wars take precedence. But one development shared from the Black Sea to the Caspian is a geopolitical awakening. The countries that did not experience physical destruction in 1941-45 did not have the same impetus as Ukraine and the Baltic states to re-evaluate those years when the Soviet Union collapsed. After 2022, they started walking a tightrope between managing dangerous Russian imperial narratives on one hand, and celebrating Victory Day as a proxy for dependent economic and security relations with Russia on the other.

Russia’s victory narrative: with us or against us?

As we can see, Victory Day has evolved as a regime legitimization tool not only for Russia, but for all post-Soviet states, except for the Baltics, at various points since 1965. Its evolution can be broadly grouped into three overlapping phases. The first was commemorating veterans, with more muted troop parades (1965-2010, the last one with major western participation). This was followed by integration with Russian security and “colour revolution” narratives featuring Saint George symbology and heavy military equipment (2005 to present). After 2013 and the first major disruption in Russia’s relations with the West (the 2008 invasion of Georgia was largely overlooked), Victory Day began merging with justifying aggression against Ukraine. In Donetsk, Immortal Regiments included portraits of killed separatist fighters alongside Second World War casualties.

Victory Day became largely incompatible with European integration narratives present in EU and NATO states, Ukraine, and parts of Moldova, although not Armenia despite its disappointment with Russian security arrangements. The latest phase began under conditions of full-scale war in 2022. Physically, the 2023 and 2024 parades were even less grandiose than before, but the inclusion of Russian invasion veterans marked a new era. War criminals are now on the “main square of the country” this time rather than just in warlord-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk. Russian memory politics show that the Second World War never truly ended. However, this change completes the link from 1945 to the present as a solid line, rather than a dashed one.

What does this mean for Russia’s neighbours? The war pretense of “denazification” shows that honouring the “Soviet nation” is non-negotiable for Russia. Russian memory politics leave no room for nuance, for commemorating victims of communist leadership, or remembering victims of Soviet co-belligerence with the Nazis and of wartime deportations, such as that of the Balts, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Kalmyks, Poles, Volga Germans, and other minorities,. Russian institutions have sought to export celebrations, symbology and their “truth” about the unending Great Patriotic War (from 1941 to the present in Ukraine). Countries dependent on Russia continue to honour May 9th while banning only the explicit “Z” propaganda. Every May, this cultural phenomenon serves as a visible indicator of how Caucasian and Central Asian states have actually bolstered their ties with Russia after 2022. In 2025, troops from Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian states marched alongside the Russian army on Red Square.

This year, Putin also presented the geopolitical implications of his memory policy to the world. First, he described the victory as the “great feat of representatives of different nationalities [in the Soviet Red Army], who will forever remain in world history as Russian soldiers” – erasing the distinction between the 15 successor states the same way he did with Ukraine before the full-scale invasion. Second, he again presented the war against Ukraine as an existential, non-negotiable struggle, with no distinction between the Kremlin and the nation: “The entire country, society, and people support the participants of the special military operation.” Third, in Xi’s presence, he also acknowledged China’s role in the Second World War – the only country credited besides the Soviet Union.

The past three years have shown that even Russia’s grotesque appropriation of history for aggression has largely been a soft power success. Why is Russia’s May 9th narrative still so potent among neighbours who could potentially be next on the invasion list?

In his book on Russian memory politics, Shaun Walker describes how Putin seized on the holiday to make Russians feel like “winners”, starting this as early as his speech to Second World War veterans on May 9th 2000. In 2018, the Levada Center’s director Lev Gudkov credited a feeling of imperial sentiment for Putin’s popularity: “the main area of ​​his achievements, as understood by these 86 per cent [of Russians polled], is international politics, where he, as people say, “forced other countries to recognize Russia’s great power status”. This is a symbolic compensation for the everyday feeling of constant humiliation of the little man. These are extremely important things.” 

Unfortunately, the same tactic applies to other regimes. Many post-Soviet presidents enjoyed heading military parades and reminding people of victory as they developed national ideologies for newly independent states. Eighty years on, the “Great Patriotic War” still strikes a real chord.

Moscow’s Red Square ahead of the 9th of May parade in 2025. Photo: Stanislav Palamar / Shutterstock

Losing the narrative war?

The 80th anniversary parade in Moscow was not only another depressing waypoint in an abuse of history. In addition to the usual post-Soviet hybrid regimes, nearly 20 leaders attended the parade, including from Brazil, Burkina Faso (with Africa’s youngest leader personifying a geopolitical pivot from post-colonial France to Russia), China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mongolia, Myanmar, Palestine, the Republic of Congo, Serbia, Slovakia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and the two separatist entities of Abkhazia and Republika Srpska. India downgraded its delegation due to hostilities with Pakistan, while Azerbaijan and Laos cancelled at the last minute.

What should western democracies make of these memory politics? First, the former Soviet states’ May 9th traditions indicate mixed societal and elite support for Russia in spite of its assault on post-war territorial norms (with other examples being votes and abstentions favouring Russia at the United Nations, participation in sanctions evasion schemes, and divided support for Russia or Ukraine in Central Asian public opinion polls). The endurance of Russian-style May 9th celebrations suggests two motivations: elite concerns with breaking ranks with Russia and threatening their own security unnecessarily (lest they accelerate becoming the “next Ukraine”), and elite bandwagoning on Victory Day as an enduring source of domestic regime legitimacy. Notably, the second issue is not limited to the region: US President Donald Trump said he wants his own Victory Day by renaming Veteran’s Day, and is a known fan of military parades. Simply spreading Baltic or Ukrainian historical policies is unlikely to work in countries that did not experience the cruelty of Molotov-Ribbentrop firsthand.

Second, western governments must acknowledge and play into the link between history and patriotism – and not tarnish all Soviet-era memory as toxic imperialism. Insisting on societies to abandon celebration is risky because many non-Russians remain proud of their veteran ancestors and respect their contribution to protecting their homeland from attack, much like Ukraine is doing. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, pro-European and western narratives must compete with a Russian one that offers “post-Soviet” citizens a chance to feel like winners. In doing so, healthy public diplomacy should respect the sacrifices of individual Allied soldiers and civilians – never Stalin or the Soviet regime. The Biden administration showed an understanding of historical symbolism by signing the Ukraine Democracy Lend-Lease Act of 2022 on May 9th, portraying Ukraine as the rightful successor to the defence of humanity, and the Russian army effectively as the new Wehrmacht.

A propaganda billboard in Makiivka in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast connecting the liberation of the region in the Second World War with today’s events. Photo: Shutterstock

Lastly, academics and information campaigners in the West should imagine the risks of not only Russian victory in Ukraine, but Russian victory in writing history. What would popular history in the region look like in that scenario? The multi-year “special military operation” will have been a continuation of the “Great Patriotic War”, just as the “heroic sacrifice” of 1941-45 was a continuation of Russia’s repulse of Napoleon. The nearly 30 BRICS and “Global South” leaders on stage with Putin this year showed their tacit support for this narrative. The long-winding victory is one of the most potent drugs in Russia’s informational arsenal and will require shrewd European informational strategy to counter it.

Alexander Neuman holds an MA in International Security and a BA in International Politics and Russian and Eurasian Studies from George Mason University. He is also a former visiting student at the University of Warsaw and an alumnus of New Eastern Europe’s Think Tank School.

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Central Asia, May 9th, Post-soviet memory, post-Soviet space, Russian war against Ukraine, Second World War