Moscow’s once mighty military has turned into a marching band four years after Russia launched its war on Ukraine.

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin oversaw the puniest Victory Day parade in history Saturday, stripped entirely of any heavy military hardware as his four-year “special operation” against Ukraine continues to stall.

The annual parade in Red Square ‌is the most revered Russian holiday, marking the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and memorializing its 27 million killed. 

Once used to show off Russia’s vast military power – including its nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles — this year’s dud didn’t even have tanks.

Instead,  Yars intercontinental ballistic missile, the Peresvet laser weapon, the new Arkhangelsk nuclear submarine,    the Sukhoi Su-57 fighter, the S-500 surface-to-air missile system, along with drones and artillery were shown on giant screens.

Experts said the scaled down spectacle shows the success of Ukraine’s counterattack.

“It’s very simple. They’re afraid of Ukrainian drones,” said John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine who is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

“That parade is an important propaganda holiday for Putin,” he noted. But Russia’s military brass has been “freaked out by Ukraine’s growing drone reach” after a series of spectacular attacks inside the Motherland.

“The Ukrainians now demonstrated ability to strike 1,000 miles or more into Russia from their own border. They’ve been doing it over the last couple of months, especially the last few weeks, and the Russians are spooked,” he said.

The strike on a major munitions factory in Chuvash, following strikes on oil and transportation facilities, rattled leaders and impressed Russian military bloggers.

Just a handful of world leaders, including  Belarus’s Lukashenits and Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev  showed up.

Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, a European Union member, laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier memorial just outside the Kremlin walls — but didn’t attend the parade.
Putin did seem willing to risk masses of Russian troops in the flag-waving display. 

They even supplemented their marchers with Kalashnikovs-wielding North Korean troops, who battled Ukrainians in Russia’s Kursk region.

The day before, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky trolled the Kremlin and suggested foreign leaders stay home. He issued an official decree to “allow a parade to be held in Moscow” and pledged to exclude Red Square from attacks – even posting its exact coordinates. That was an unmistakable signal that Ukraine could hit other Russian targets if it wished, after carrying out a series of drone attacks deep inside Russian territory.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, warned that any attempt by Kyiv to disrupt Saturday’s event would lead to a massive missile strike on the Ukrainian capital. Moscow told foreign diplomats they should evacuate Kyiv staff in the event of such an attack.

Both countries agreed to a three-day ceasefire requested by President Trump, which also included a 1,000-per-side prisoner exchange that was likely pushed by Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine sacrificed greatly as Soviet forces drove back the Nazis until VE Day in 1945.

The parade came as victory for Moscow’s forces has proven elusive more than four years into the deadliest European conflict since World War II.

Soldiers and sailors, some of whom have served in Ukraine, marched and cheered as Putin looked on, seated beside Russian veterans in the shadow of Vladimir Lenin’s Mausoleum. Fighter planes flew above the towers of the Kremlin and Putin made an eight-minute speech, promising victory in the war in Ukraine which the Kremlin calls the “special military operation.” 

Putin used the occasion to link Russia’s role in the war against Nazi Germany to its stalled war in Ukraine. The effort has led to hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, according to exiled media outlets. He called it a “just” war against an “aggressive force.”

“The great feat of the victorious generation inspires the soldiers carrying out the tasks of the special military operation today,” Putin said. “They are confronting an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc. And in spite of that, our heroes march forward.”

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Red Army eventually pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Adolf Hitler killed himself and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in May 1945.

Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender came into force at 11:01 p.m. on May 8, 1945, marked as “Victory in Europe Day” by Britain, the United States and France. In Moscow it was already May 9, which became the Soviet Union’s “Victory Day” in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.

But this year’s parade ⁠came amid a wave of anxiousness in Moscow about the ultimate outcome of the conflict in Ukraine.

The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, left swathes of Ukraine in ruins and drained Russia’s $3 trillion economy, while Russia’s relations with Europe are worse than at any time since the depths of the Cold War.

“The crisis is still deepening gradually, but any sharp movement can send the economy (and not only the economy) into ⁠a tailspin,” jailed pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who has criticized the Kremlin for its conduct of the war, said in a post on Telegram.

Girkin, a former Federal Security Service officer, used a naval analogy to say that Russia’s leaders were more worried about being kicked out of their cabins than about a shipwreck.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov this week dismissed CNN and other Western media reports that ⁠Putin’s protection had been intensified because of fears of a coup or assassination.

Russian officials have dismissed reports of a coup plot as nonsense.

CNN cited an unidentified European intelligence agency as saying that Putin’s former defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, was seen as a potential coup leader.

Security Council Secretary Shoigu, who attended an online meeting of the Security Council chaired by Putin on Friday, was at the parade on Saturday, sitting beside some of Putin’s most powerful officials.

“I cannot predict he’ll be gone tomorrow or in the next month or two or three,” Herbst told The Post of Putin. “If current trends continue, I would not bet on him being around in a few years.”

With Post Wires