Russia is planning a military parade in the long-besieged port of Mariupol for May 9, the day Moscow celebrates victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, Ukrainian intelligence said on Wednesday. According to the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR), the deputy director of the Russian presidential administration Sergey Kirienko arrived in Mariupol, today almost completely destroyed, to prepare for this parade. “The main mission of Vladimir Putin’s official is to prepare the ceremonies on May 9,” read a statement from the GUR on Telegram.
Mariupol, a port city in southeastern Ukraine, “will become a center of celebrations,” the statement added. “The main avenues of the city are urgently cleaned, the debris and the bodies of the dead removed, as well as the ammunition which did not explode”, specifies the press release. Russian viewers will see reports of Mariupol residents’ “joy” at seeing the Russians arrive in their town, he added. The feast of May 9 is each year the occasion of a great military parade in Moscow, on Red Square.
Still according to the GUR, “a large-scale propaganda campaign is underway” among the population of the city, now estimated by the Ukrainian authorities at between 100,000 and 120,000 people, against nearly half a million before the war.
“They are suppressing all evidence of the crimes they committed,” Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boitchenko told Ukrainian television. “They give food to the local population in exchange for their work,” he said.
Poppy
Asked about preparations for May 9, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu did not explicitly mention the possibility of such a parade in Mariupol. “This year, military parades will take place in 28 Russian cities”, he only indicated, specifying that “nearly 65,000 people, about 2,400 types of weapons and military equipment and more than 460 planes will be mobilized” .
Mariupol is almost entirely under Russian military control. Only the immense Azovstal metallurgical complex, where the last Ukrainian fighters and civilians are entrenched, has not yet been completely taken by the forces of Moscow. About 200 civilians are still present in Azovstal, according to the mayor of Mariupol.
A Ukrainian commander of the Azov regiment defending the steel plant said on Tuesday that the Russians had launched the assault on the site, but the Kremlin denied this information on Wednesday.
The spokesperson for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Oleksandre Motouzianyk, for his part, assured that “Victory Day will (well and truly) be celebrated on May 9, given the current context”. Since 2015, a year after the start of the conflict in the east of the country with pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow, Ukrainians have used the poppy as the official emblem of the commemorations, as do some Anglo-Saxon countries, rather than the ribbon of Orange and black St. George used by Russians and other ex-USSR countries.
And for fifteen years, the Ukrainian authorities have now spoken of victory over Nazism during the “Second World War”, and no longer “Great Patriotic War”, as Moscow always describes it.