Et is not often that the Russian leadership invites the crowds to Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. Where key games of the 2018 World Cup took place, Russians are brought with flags in their hands when it comes to staging enthusiasm for President Vladimir Putin in front of state television audiences. For example, before the 2018 presidential election, which was scheduled to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea; So it is this Friday, on the eighth anniversary of the Anschluss, when tens of thousands attend a “demonstration concert” in the stadium. However, it will be a show that above all raises questions.
Long before the start, people in the stadium wave their tricolors back and forth as the cameras are trained on them. Young men are shown expressing their support for “our soldiers” and Putin’s “military special operation”, as the war against Ukraine is called. According to reports from the channel Rossiya 1, allegedly coming from the Russian-Ukrainian border, the Ukrainians themselves shelled Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which had been under siege by Russian forces for three weeks.