To borrow a great line from the movie Under Siege 2, “Assumption is the mother of all f*** ups.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed that launching the war on Ukraine in February 2022 would lead to a rapid and decisive Russian victory. He was wrong.
As Russia fails to make substantive progress in that war more than four years later, Putin is adopting an escalating siege mentality. This reflects both the Kremlin’s fear of Ukraine and of growing domestic discontent.
Consider that this year’s iteration of the annual May 9 Victory Day military parade will involve no ground forces. Celebrating the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, these parades have long been a focal point of pageantry and pride for Putin. This year, however, only aircraft will participate.
This decision reflects the extraordinary innovation of Ukrainian forces in repeatedly penetrating Russian defenses to conduct aerial drone attacks. Take the 2025 incident in which Ukraine hid drones inside container trucks and then deployed them just outside of key Russian air bases. Perhaps 20% of Russia’s strategic bomber force was destroyed in this single incident. Recent weeks have seen successive strikes by Ukrainian forces on supposedly well-protected Russian energy depots.
But this year’s muted Victory Day parade isn’t just about the threat posed by Ukraine. The Kremlin is also reluctant to advertise the great strain that the war has put on its military materiel.
While it did deploy ground equipment in 2025 to mark the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat, the 2023 and 2024 Victory Day parades were vastly scaled down. Those iterations included just one World War II-era tank, a canceled 2023 flyover supposedly due to bad weather (even though the skies were clear), and greatly reduced flyovers in 2024 and 2025. In contrast, the 2021 parade, the last before the start of the war, featured a vast range of military capabilities, including varied tanks, artillery, infantry, missile, and aviation units. Only Russian intercontinental ballistic missile units have featured at each post-2021 parade, reflecting their irrelevance to the war in Ukraine. But not this year.
Putin knows that to replicate the 2021 parade, Russia would have to rely upon personnel and equipment in very short supply: material that is currently serving on or destined for the front line. Always paranoid about the perception of his power, Putin is loath to earn the domestic and international attention that would fix on the sight of his presiding over a parade manned by aging veterans, young cadets, and an array of aging equipment.
The parade antics are only one example of Putin’s growing siege mentality.
Recent weeks have also seen mounting public frustration over government restrictions on popular encrypted communications apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Rolling restrictions on cell phone internet service have also been introduced. They will apply during the Victory Day parade, for example.
As the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg reports, these restrictions are causing deep frustration in Russian daily life and business operations. And while the government says these restrictions are necessary for Ukraine-related security reasons, that’s only partly true.
Putin and his FSB Security Service certainly want to stop Ukrainian intelligence officers and agents from using these apps to plot attacks and recruit sources. But they also want to make it harder for domestic political opposition to Putin to develop. With Russia’s economy in tatters and the war showing no sign of ending, the Kremlin’s fear is growing.
The interest in preventing effective political opposition is further underlined by the increasing consolidation of Kremlin power structures. As I noted in June 2024, Putin has promoted numerous officials to important Kremlin positions based on their family ties to trusted members of his inner circle. This trend has only advanced since then.
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Putin has always been paranoid about perceived or real challenges to his rule. Still, his concerns have significantly escalated following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted 2023 coup attempt.
In turn, while recent decisions show that while Prigozhin might have subsequently gone up in smoke, Putin is finding it far harder to bottle up the unpredictable fire he has lit with the war in Ukraine.