Is Ukraine Winning? What Victory Day 2026 Revealed About Russia's War

Say whatever you will about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but the man is a consummate professional in the art of ragebaiting. Turn back the clock by about a week, and Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to work his way through a difficult problem. On Saturday, the ninth of May, Moscow would hold its annual Victory Day celebration in Red Square, commemorating the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II. Unfortunately for Putin, Red Square had become more vulnerable than ever, in a year when Ukrainian drones have struck deep into Russian territory, including the capital itself, with ease.

The warning signs had been accumulating for weeks. Moscow announced it would decline to display military equipment this year, when a normal parade would feature tanks and ballistic missiles. Very few foreign dignitaries planned to attend, a sharp contrast with 2025, when Putin watched the parade alongside China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Lula da Silva. And Russia’s attempt to unilaterally declare a ceasefire went sideways: Ukraine declared its own ceasefire a couple of days earlier, watched Russia ignore it and bomb a kindergarten, and gave itself all the credibility it needed to ignore Russia’s ceasefire in turn — just as Russia had ignored its own.

Russia was running out of options, and the moment of truth was approaching. Then, just as the day of the parade arrived, Putin got his ceasefire with the aid of US President Donald Trump. That was the moment a world-class ragebaiter saw his opening, and seized the initiative. Zelenskyy issued a declaration that captured headlines across the globe: “I hereby decree: to permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on May 9, 2026.”

Key Takeaways

Russia’s Victory Day 2026 parade was scaled back dramatically — no heavy equipment, few foreign leaders, and a ceasefire that Putin only secured by appealing to Donald Trump.
Zelenskyy’s mocking decree “permitting” the parade landed harder than it appeared, because in Russia’s prison-rules political culture, an unanswered public humiliation can confirm fatal weakness.
Russian milbloggers — the ultranationalist war watchers whose support Putin needs — reacted with fury, calling the moment a “slap in the face” that demanded retaliation Russia never delivered.
Putin’s home front was already deteriorating: Kremlin insiders breaking silence, ordinary Russians venting online through forced blackouts, and reports of a paranoid leader living out of bunkers and fearing a palace coup.
Ukraine is now imposing very high costs at the front from its fortified “fortress belt,” while AI-guided medium-range drones that need no human operator have rendered Russian jamming irrelevant and devastated Russia’s back lines.
Long-range Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries, export terminals, and weapons factories continue unabated, gutting the export revenue Putin was counting on.
An exile-outlet analysis of Russian probate records counted 352,000 Russian troops killed through the end of 2025, with 2026 losses estimated near 35,000 per month — outpacing recruitment.
Geopolitics offers Putin no relief: NATO neighbors give Ukraine grace over drone accidents, the EU sent Ukraine 90 billion euros, and Europe laughed off Russia’s proposed mediator.

The parade would go forward, and it would proceed without violence, but only because Putin had needed to call on Trump to ask big, bad Mr. Zelenskyy to let him have his parade in peace.

For most of the rest of the world, it looked like a diplomatic display that seemed rather petty — the sort of thing a particularly uncouth foreign leader might try because they could, but one that would not make much of an impact. Yet Zelenskyy’s sick burn was something more: a moment when he said the quiet part out loud, in front of the entire world. By the time Russian troops marched through Red Square, it had already been clear for a little while that the tides are starting to turn on the Ukrainian battlefield. Zelenskyy might have added some serious insult to Russia’s injury, but the injuries were already there, and now they are only getting worse.

A Taunt That Mattered More Than It Looked

It is easy to dismiss Zelenskyy’s decree as a leader being a bit of a dick because he could. He had demonstrated the power to hit Moscow, he was probably under political pressure to accept a ceasefire, and he chose to make a show of it. But one chronically underappreciated feature of Russia’s political system, especially under Putin, is the degree to which insults like that can really matter.

Deep beneath the veneer of state politics, Russia and its elite have a tendency to play by prison rules. For someone to talk shit and get away with it should be unthinkable. The expected response to a humiliation of this magnitude would have been overwhelming force. Instead, Russia mounted no substantive effort to retaliate or save face, and moved ahead with a scheduled one-thousand-for-one-thousand prisoner exchange agreed as part of the ceasefire.

The provocation only worked because of where the war stands. At most points throughout this conflict — with Ukraine badly overstretched on the front line and in desperate need of more resources — taunting Moscow like this would itself have been unthinkable, an invitation to ruinous escalation Kyiv could not have absorbed. By the same token, at most earlier phases it would have been unthinkable for Russia to swallow a week of insults without a substantive answer. That both of those things have now flipped is the story.

The danger for Putin is not that he had a bad Victory Day. If that were all, this would be a non-story. The real danger is that a single symbolic display might confirm something the world — and especially Russians — already suspected.

The Milbloggers Erupt

You do not have to take the analysis from outside observers; take it from the absolutely ballistic response of Russia’s own milbloggers, the ultranationalist, tuned-in war watchers whose support Putin badly needs.

The account Donetsk Infantry wrote that the shame for the Russian government was not that “the Ukrainian dictator issued such a decree,” but that “the authorities, who allowed Russia’s defense capabilities to be plundered, have been begging for a deal since 2014,” warning leaders who “constantly obstruct a fighting army so as not to complicate negotiations,” who “make grand gestures and supply gas and oil to those who kill Russians,” that “you will be treated as you deserve.” The account Blue Beard scoffed that “entering the circus ring with a professional clown was a stupid idea from the start,” that show politics “is like breathing through his nose for him,” and that “it’s impossible to outplay the Ukrainians on this field.”

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Two Majors fumed that “the bastard knows how to wage an information war” and that “for such a slap in the face, a blow against Kyiv could be launched right now.” DSHRG Rusych asked acidly, “Is this denazification or demilitarization? (We can’t figure it out.)”

Novorossiya Militia Reports lamented that after “elevating this worthless individual for four years, they’ve now given him a perfect opportunity to troll and laugh,” adding the bitter rhetorical question, “Are you satisfied?” Lev Vershinin admitted, “to be honest, I can’t recall a second public spitting on such a level,” and Shelter No. 8 concluded, “The old-timers themselves gave him the opportunity to troll themselves.”

The consensus was unmistakable. Among the war watchers whose backing Putin needs most, Zelenskyy’s declaration registered as such a brazen attempt to humiliate Russia that the correct response, in their eyes, would have been to exert overwhelming force. The absence of any forceful answer spoke louder than the insult itself.

The Emperor, Unclothed

The man the world saw at the parade matched the milbloggers’ alarm. Putin appeared visibly haggard, distressed at certain moments, surrounded by far more security than usual, and he left the premises as quickly as his legs could carry him once the victory march concluded. Even less characteristic were his remarks afterward. Speaking to reporters on Victory Day, Putin suggested the conflict was headed toward a conclusion — and referred to Ukraine’s president not as a dog, a criminal, or a Nazi, but as “Mr.

Zelenskyy.”

For Putin and for Russian and global onlookers alike, the events of Victory Day 2026 would have been practically unthinkable even a year ago. From withdrawing heavy military equipment to the embarrassment around Russia’s ceasefire requests, the build-up to the parade acknowledged a bitter reality Putin has refused to say aloud: Russia is still engaged with Ukrainian forces on the battlefield, but Moscow lacks the means to force Kyiv to bend to its will.

Putin has historically been remarkably resilient to crises that would tank most leaders’ careers — mismanaged military and environmental disasters, economic malaise, sanctions, forced digital blackouts, and more. But it is not at all certain he is a leader who can let insults of this magnitude pass without subtly revealing that Russia’s emperor has no clothes.

It is fair to push back here, and the obvious counterpoints deserve a hearing. Is this making too much of an admittedly sick burn that has no bearing on the rest of the conflict? Is it really such a big deal that Moscow was not actually attacked during the parade? And is this the very trap so many Western analysts fall into — seizing on the slightest sign of Putin’s weakness and over-excitedly insisting his downfall is imminent?

Those are the right questions to ask, because if the problem were simply that Putin had a bad Victory Day, this would all be a non-story. The real danger, in a moment like this one, is that a single symbolic display might confirm something the world, and especially Russians, already suspected.

A Home Front Already Cracking

Putin’s situation at home was deteriorating fast even before Victory Day. A small handful of high-profile Kremlin insiders had begun to speak publicly against him — and, notably, they appear so far to still be alive, a detail that itself signals how much the usual machinery of fear has frayed. Making matters worse, hundreds of ordinary Russians have started airing their frustrations with Moscow on social media, occasionally cut off by forced digital blackouts that have only raised tensions further rather than tamping them down.

A growing body of reporting suggests Putin’s paranoia has reached new heights: that he has been living out of bunkers, and that he fears a palace coup or even an attempt on his life. The events of the ninth of May will not win back any of his lost support among ordinary Russian citizens, and — more importantly — none among the Russian elite. The day was especially troubling precisely because it did not stand alone. It reinforced the problems already closing in on Putin from the battlefield, lending a humiliating public face to weaknesses that had until then been mostly visible to specialists.

Holding the Line: Ukraine’s Fortress Belt

The reason Victory Day cut so deep is that it reinforced Putin’s problems on the battlefield, where since the start of this year Ukraine has begun to pull ahead of Russian capabilities in many ways at once. Russia’s fight against Ukraine was always more of a challenge than the Kremlin bargained for, but the balance has been shifting.

Within a few dozen kilometers of the line of contact, Ukraine is largely holding its ground. Over recent months, Ukrainian forces have offset Russia’s dismal territorial gains by capturing territory elsewhere, particularly in the south, while Russian soldiers creep forward only very slowly in the eastern Donbas. In the north, especially around Sumy, Russian troops are seizing land of little if any practical value — abandoned patches Ukraine has not bothered to defend for several months, possibly so that Kremlin statisticians can try to win the messaging battle over territorial gains and losses.

Where Russia does grind forward, it runs into Ukraine’s vaunted fortress belt: a line of heavily entrenched positions built to deter and, if necessary, contain a Russian advance, and built for precisely that purpose. Fighting from within it, Ukrainian troops have all the supplies, the hiding positions, and the ammunition — especially drones — they need to bleed the Russian advance dry. Ukraine has also recently fielded combat-capable unmanned ground vehicles at scale, letting Kyiv keep more of its soldiers out of harm’s way, an approach Russian leadership has shown no interest in replicating.

For a force that is mostly playing defense, like Ukraine, it is never good when the enemy is advancing — but some enemy advances are better than others. Right now Ukraine is imposing very high costs on Russian soldiers as they push forward, and when Ukraine does give ground, it has done so deliberately, leading Russian troops toward very well-defended positions. Russian soldiers have little choice but to follow; their commanding officers have made clear for a long time that they value forward territorial captures over tactical sensibility, leaving the men beneath them to absorb the consequences.

Medium Range: Drones Russia Cannot Jam

Ukraine has been so effective at luring soldiers into its preferred kill zones because of what it has accomplished at medium range. There, Ukraine is leveraging very advanced drone technology — AI-enabled models that can guide themselves to a medium-range target and even carry out a precision strike if necessary, with no need for human input. Because these drones do not have to send signals back to human operators, Russia’s jamming technology is functionally irrelevant against them.

Those drones have devastated Russia’s back lines, where soldiers prepare to move toward the front, where ammunition stockpiles are built up and drawn upon, and where food, medicine, and other critical supplies sit relatively exposed. According to recent evaluations by several conflict experts, Ukraine can now strike so far into Russia-controlled territory that it reaches the road and rail infrastructure that allows Russia to sustain Crimea by land. As of now, Ukrainian drones strike with impunity all across the region near the Sea of Azov, compromising Russia’s ability to defend and protect the Crimean isthmus. One Russian drone developer wrote online that, because of Ukraine’s success, Russia has had to restrict the size of its logistical convoys in Donetsk so that just two trucks are allowed to travel together at a time.

The cumulative effect is strategic. Those nagging mid-range strikes have made Russia’s planned spring and summer offensive impossible in the way it was originally drawn up — not by meeting force with force, but by kicking out the supports that would have allowed the offensive to succeed. As a result, Russian forces at the front have become highly reactive, seeking advantages whenever and wherever they appear, which only makes them easier to lead into traps and disadvantageous positions.

Long Range: Refineries, Factories, and Diverted Air Defenses

At long range, Ukraine’s strikes against Russian energy infrastructure and its military-industrial complex show no signs of stopping. On the Black Sea, on the Baltic Sea, and deeper into Russian territory, oil refineries and export terminals have been under constant attack, with some sites taking direct hits several times each within the span of just a couple of weeks. Russian manufacturing centers, ammunition factories, and weapons assembly lines have faced a similarly grave threat.

The Victory Day build-up compounded the problem. To protect the parade, Russia diverted air defenses away from relatively remote areas toward Moscow and St. Petersburg. Those remote systems often were not protecting much in their immediate vicinity, but they were critical for monitoring corridors where Ukrainian drones could be detected as they pass through on the way to a more important target elsewhere.

In that role, remote air defenses provided advance warning of incoming attacks and trimmed away at drone swarms so that air defense systems at the destination would not be overwhelmed. Pulling them back to guard the capital left those corridors blind.

The bleak summary, delivered by WarFronts with the appropriate edge of sarcasm: Ukraine seems to have set the goal that Russia’s exports should be carbon-neutral by 2027 — and they are already well on their way.

Russia’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

At close, medium, and long range alike, Russia has only made its own problems worse. When Russia’s Starlink access was cut off a few months ago, Moscow lost many of its most important battlefield communication capabilities — and because of years of corruption, mismanagement, and poor design and implementation, it had no alternative system ready to fill the void. When Russia then decided to cut off access to the messaging app Telegram, it made things worse still for the unit leaders at the front who had relied on the app to coordinate with each other in a pinch.

And despite nearly incomprehensible losses, Russia has continued to try to press forward. On the ninth of May, one of the leading trackers of Russian battlefield fatalities — run by the Russian exile outlets Meduza and Mediazona — found that 352,000 Russian troops had been killed in the war through the end of 2025, based on close analysis of Russian probate records. That figure excludes the members of paramilitary groups, it excludes foreigners such as North Koreans and forcibly conscripted African migrants, and it excludes the wounded, the missing, and prisoners of war. That is 352,000 fatalities, and it includes none of the fighting in 2026, where other estimates suggest Russia is losing around 35,000 soldiers each month — outpacing recruitment rates since roughly the start of this year.

No Relief Abroad

In a situation like this one, Putin might have looked beyond the front for relief, but global geopolitics will not cooperate. Ukraine’s long-range strikes against Baltic Sea targets are not without risk: just this past weekend, the defense minister of NATO member Latvia was forced to resign after a pair of Ukrainian drones wandered over the border from Russia and destroyed oil storage containers on their journey north. It is relatively common for Ukrainian drone debris to fall on the NATO countries along that northward route, yet those accidents have not led to any international incidents. Instead, those nations have given Ukraine grace, met its drone operators with patience and understanding, and doubled down on the idea that Putin should never have started this war in the first place.

The pattern held even when a Ukrainian sea drone packed with high explosives turned up in Greek waters last week, discovered in a coastal cave by a fisherman; it was detonated safely, with no public display of frustration from the Greek government. Ukraine, meanwhile, just received 90 billion euros in European Union funding — money that, as a handful of frustrated Russian milbloggers have pointed out, will sustain a Ukrainian war economy that has already survived much longer than the Kremlin ever promised it would.

Farther from Eastern Europe, the war in Iran appears to be on the brink of flaring up again, and is nowhere close to a resolution. Had Russia been able to export oil at high prices as it intended, a prolonged Iran war could have helped the Kremlin enormously — but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s export terminals have largely erased that opportunity. With Iran otherwise engaged, Chinese leadership will welcome a visit from Donald Trump this week, with no telling what could come out of that meeting until it happens — good or bad for Moscow.

Schroder, and the Black Eye of a Lifetime

Russia’s diplomatic isolation showed in its choice of olive branch. When Moscow suggested this week that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder could serve as Europe’s mediator in talks to end the war, European leaders practically laughed in Russia’s face. To Moscow, Schroder was a safe suggestion — a former German leader who also shares close ties with the Kremlin, especially its state-owned energy companies. Russia’s now-deceased opposition leader Alexey Navalny once accused him of being “paid by Putin.”

Strange as it seems, Schroder may have been a genuine attempt by Russia to offer a level of compromise: a candidate with deep ties to Europe and deep ties to Russia itself. Whether Europe would ever have agreed to such an idea, after Schroder was largely disgraced over his Kremlin links, is an open question. But in a world where Europe still felt it had to appease Putin to get him to the negotiating table, Schroder might have turned into a real candidate to lead the talks. Instead, Europe’s chronically over-cautious leadership enthusiastically shot the idea down — and it is hardly a coincidence that they were willing to do so just after Putin’s Victory Day delivered him the black eye of a lifetime.

Take all that context together — front-line disorganization, back-line vulnerability, staggering troop fatalities — and the events of Russia’s Victory Day take on a different meaning. The Kremlin has had to make the sorts of tough decisions that were once unthinkable: put away the tanks, sacrifice other targets to defend Moscow’s airspace, and, when Zelenskyy came along to rub the situation in Russia’s face, sit there and take it. No one can see inside Putin’s mind, and nor would anyone want to, but everyone could see the man on the ninth of May: a paranoid, exhausted, withering old man who understands the danger all around him but has not yet worked out a way to avoid it.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was Russia’s 2026 Victory Day parade scaled back?

Red Square had become more vulnerable than ever to Ukrainian deep strikes, so Moscow declined to display military equipment that a normal parade would feature, such as tanks and ballistic missiles. Few foreign dignitaries attended, unlike 2025, when Putin was joined by China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and Russia diverted air defenses to protect the capital.

What did Zelenskyy’s “decree” say, and why did it matter more than it appeared?

Zelenskyy publicly declared, “I hereby decree: to permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on May 9, 2026,” mocking the fact that Putin had needed Donald Trump’s help to secure a ceasefire so the parade could proceed safely. It mattered because in Russia’s prison-rules political culture, a public humiliation that goes unanswered can confirm dangerous weakness in front of the elite — and Russia mounted no substantive response.

How did Russian milbloggers and Putin’s own circle react?

With fury. Accounts including Two Majors, Donetsk Infantry, Blue Beard, and others called it a “slap in the face” and a “public spitting,” arguing the correct response would have been overwhelming force. Putin himself appeared haggard at the parade, left Red Square as quickly as possible, and then referred to Ukraine’s president not as a criminal or a Nazi but as “Mr. Zelenskyy” — an extraordinary shift in language.

Why is Russia’s jamming technology ineffective against Ukraine’s newest drones?

Ukraine is fielding AI-enabled drones that guide themselves to medium-range targets and can strike with precision without any human input. Because they do not send signals back to human operators, Russia’s jamming technology is functionally irrelevant against them. These drones have devastated Russia’s back lines and logistics, and have even allowed Ukraine to threaten the road and rail infrastructure sustaining Crimea by land.

How many Russian soldiers have been killed, and what do the 2026 casualty estimates show?

A tracker run by the exile outlets Meduza and Mediazona, using close analysis of Russian probate records, counted 352,000 Russian troops killed through the end of 2025. That figure excludes paramilitaries, foreign fighters, and the wounded, missing, and captured. Other estimates put 2026 losses near 35,000 soldiers per month, a pace that has been outstripping Russian recruitment rates since roughly the start of the year.