How Putin Co-opted Russia’s Biggest Holiday

For years, President Vladimir V. Putin has taken advantage of Victory Day — when Russians commemorate the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany — to champion his country’s military might and project himself as a leader of enormous power.

This year, he drew on the pageantry of May 9 for an even more pressing goal: making the case for the war in Ukraine.

Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.

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Background reading: 

• Victory Day in Moscow this year was set up to be a lavish government-orchestrated show of Russian strength and a claim of rightful dominance over a lost empire.
• Mr. Putin delivered a speech in which he vowed that the military would keep fighting to rid Ukraine, in his false telling, of “torturers, death squads and Nazis.”

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