Vladimir Putin stood before a hollowed-out Victory Day parade on Saturday and told the world the Ukraine war was winding down — a claim delivered from a Red Square stripped of the tanks, missiles and military grandeur that have defined the annual commemoration for nearly two decades, in front of a grandstand conspicuously empty of the foreign leaders who once treated the occasion as an obligatory show of alignment with Moscow.
“I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin told reporters of a conflict that has now consumed five years, killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides, reduced large sections of Ukraine to rubble and drained Russia’s economy at a pace that official statistics have been carefully arranged to obscure.
He said he was willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe. He named his preferred interlocutor for those negotiations — not a sitting head of government, not a NATO official, but Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s former chancellor, a man whose post-political career has been defined by his proximity to Putin and his involvement with Russian energy projects including the Nord Stream pipelines.
The choice of Schröder is not accidental and not subtle. He is a figure Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called “disgusting” in 2022 after he met with Putin and spoke in the Russian leader’s favor in the early weeks of the full-scale invasion.
Proposing him as a negotiating partner is less a diplomatic overture than a signal about the kind of Europe Putin is interested in engaging — one mediated by friendly former officials rather than hostile current governments.
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Putin’s remarks came on the first day of a three-day ceasefire that Russia, Ukraine and Donald Trump jointly announced on Friday. The truce began with both sides immediately accusing the other of violations, with continued drone activity and reports of civilian casualties across the front lines. The Kremlin said there were no plans to extend the ceasefire beyond its announced duration. Both governments had agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners each during the pause, though Putin said Russia had not yet received any proposals from Ukraine on the swap.
The parade that provided the backdrop for Putin’s statements was a diminished spectacle by any historical comparison. No military hardware appeared on Red Square — the first time in nearly two decades that tanks, intercontinental ballistic missiles and armored vehicles have been absent from the May 9 display. The change was attributed officially to security concerns over Ukrainian drone activity, an explanation that carried its own embarrassing implication: that Russia, after five years of war, could not guarantee the airspace above its capital during its most symbolically important national event. Only the leaders of Belarus, Malaysia, Laos, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan attended — a roster that underscored how comprehensively Russia has been diplomatically isolated from the world beyond its immediate dependents, contrasting sharply with last year when China’s Xi Jinping occupied a prominent position in the grandstand.
In the week before the parade, the desperation to protect the event from disruption had been visible and uncharacteristically explicit.
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Moscow threatened to strike the center of Kyiv, including foreign embassies, if Ukraine attempted to interfere, and warned overseas diplomatic missions to evacuate their staff. The threats were calibrated to deter Ukrainian drone operations but functioned simultaneously as an admission that Russian air defenses could not be fully trusted to do the job unassisted.
Zelenskyy chose to mark Saturday as Europe Day — the EU’s foundational commemoration — rather than engage with the Russian Victory Day framing. “From the first days of the full-scale war until today, Europe has stood with Ukraine. And this is not charity — it is a choice made by Europeans: to stand on the same side as the brave and the strong,” he said, positioning Ukraine as an inseparable part of the European family rather than a party to a bilateral Russian conflict.
Putin’s readiness to meet Zelenskyy remains heavily conditioned. He said a face-to-face meeting should be “the final point, not the negotiations themselves” — meaning he would only sit across from the Ukrainian president once all terms had already been settled by others. It is a posture designed to look like openness while foreclosing the kind of direct engagement that might produce genuine movement.
Russian forces currently control just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, concentrated in the eastern Donbas region where advances have slowed significantly this year. The fortress cities of eastern Ukraine have held.
The crushing defeat that Putin said Western governments spent months anticipating never materialized — but neither has the Russian victory that his five years of prosecution of this war were supposed to deliver. The parade is over. The war, whatever Putin says about its trajectory, continues.