Russia’s Military Show of Strength Masks Economic and Diplomatic Cracks

Russia will celebrate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat on Friday with visiting heads of state and a show of armed might in Red Square, staged as a display of global clout, grandiose and intimidating, and a portent of eventual triumph in the war against Ukraine.

The annual military parade below the walls and towers of the Kremlin is expected to be the largest since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a commemoration the government and its cheerleaders have used to raise support for the war, conflating what may be the greatest source of national pride with the far more divisive current conflict.

“Our great victory 80 years ago is a new narrative, new conception of Russia’s current standoff with the West,” Sergei Lyaguzin, an international relations professor, said on Russian state television this week.

Behind the pomp, though, Russia stands on shakier ground than the Kremlin’s confident show suggests. Its military is barely advancing on the battlefield, its economy is sputtering, prices for oil, its main export, are falling and, perhaps most surprising, President Trump is hinting that his view of President Vladimir V. Putin and his war is souring.

Mr. Putin has played down these challenges, accepting short-term economic pain and diplomatic setbacks in the hope that his persistence will eventually yield a triumph of historic proportions, said Alexander Kolyandr, a Russian economy expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a research group.

“They are convinced that they are more resilient than their opponents,” he said in a phone interview. “They believe that victory will not go to the side that is the best, but to the one that remains standing the longest.”

After initially echoing Moscow’s talking points — even falsely blaming Ukraine for the war — Mr. Trump has hardened his rhetoric about Mr. Putin and the Kremlin in recent weeks. Mr. Trump is threatening to punish the buyers of Russian oil, he is sending more advanced weapons to Ukraine, and he has struck a mineral development deal with Kyiv that gives the United States a valuable stake in Ukraine’s future security and prosperity.

In Ukraine, the Russian military is making sparse gains and absorbing heavily losses. Russian forces have seized an average of 2.5 square miles a day over the past three months, according to calculations by a Finnish-based military intelligence firm, the Black Bird Group. At this pace it would take Russia years to conquer the regions that it has already claimed to annex.

Rather than changing course, Mr. Putin has doubled down on his policies and demands. He has declined Mr. Trump’s proposal to freeze the fighting along the current front line before starting to negotiate a peace deal, and has demanded that the United States get the European Union to lift some of its sanctions.

At the same time, Russian forces have continued to pound Ukrainian cities, killing or wounding more than 2,600 civilians in the first three months of the year, according to the United Nations. A particularly deadly strike on Kyiv last month led Mr. Trump to issue a rare public rebuke to Mr. Putin.

“It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently,” with additional sanctions, Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in late April.

Despite such challenges, about a dozen heads of state, including leaders of the economic giants China and Brazil, are expected in Red Square on Friday, underscoring the Kremlin’s claim that far-reaching Western sanctions have failed to isolate Russia. More than 130 pieces of military equipment, including intercontinental missile carriers, are scheduled to roll through Moscow and soldiers from friendly nations are expected to march with Russian troops, showing that Russia is not alone in what it presents as a proxy struggle against NATO.

On the economic front, however, Russia is wounded and losing steam, pressured by falling oil prices, rapidly dwindling foreign currency reserves, record-high interest rates and the punitive sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s main ally, China, is reducing purchases of Russian coal and steel as it adjusts to a trade war with the United States.

Russia has accepted a decision made this month by a group of major oil exporting countries, known as OPEC+, to ramp up output, a move that has depressed oil prices already hit by the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. The benchmark Brent oil blend traded at about $62 per barrel on Wednesday, down from about $75 when Mr. Trump announced his global tariffs on Apr. 2.

Falling oil revenue, which finances about 40 percent of Russia’s government budget, is already hurting its war economy. The Ministry of Finance this month more than tripled the budget deficit forecast for this year to 1.7 percent of gross domestic product, and slashed its price forecast for Russia’s main type of exported oil from $70 per barrel to $56.

Analysts estimate that to cover the rising deficit, the government would have to either spend its remaining rainy day stockpile of foreign reserves and gold, or print more money, which would worsen the already high inflation, now running at about 10 percent. The Kremlin considered, but this week scrapped, a proposal to reduce public spending to compensate for declining oil prices.

Mr. Putin has tolerated the central bank’s policy of keeping interest rates at record highs in an attempt to dampen price increases. But a growing chorus of Russian officials and businessmen has blamed the interest rates, kept at 21 percent since October, for wiping out growth without cooling prices, a lose-lose economic scenario known as stagflation.

Russian consumers are grumbling about food prices, which rose at an annual rate of more than 12 percent in March, but these concerns have so far have not translated into broader dissatisfaction with the government, said Denis Volkov, head of Moscow-based independent pollster Levada Center.

Rising wages, government subsidies for the poor, and decades of living with high inflation mean that in surveys conducted as recently as April more Russians say that their economic situation is improving, rather than worsening, Mr. Volkov said in an interview in Moscow.

That political stability will allow Moscow to project national unity in the celebration on Friday, despite the lack of major diplomatic or military breakthroughs in the war. Mr. Putin has regularly used Victory Day, Russia’s main secular holiday, to convey that time is on his side.

Russia’s determination and size ground down Germany’s Wehrmacht, Europe’s military hegemon at the time, in World War II, goes the propaganda messaging, and Ukraine’s NATO-supplied and trained forces will eventually follow suit.

“These scoundrels had once again united against us,” said Yevgeniy, a Russian soldier who fought in Ukraine until he was wounded in December. He asked to withhold his last name because he is not authorized to speak to the public.

“We would’ve been destroyed, wiped out as a nation if we didn’t fight back,” he said, echoing the Kremlin’s unsubstantiated justification for the invasion. “My grandfather fought; I fought: We are the same.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from Istanbul.