On Russia’s Victory Day, Putin faces choice on general mobilization of soldiers

Several top Russian officials have sought to quash the rumors. “No, no. I can tell you this on and off air,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian parliament, in comments Thursday to Russian radio.

A day earlier, two shadowy figures in the Siberian oil city Nizhnevartovsk made clear what they thought of conscription. One, wearing a gray hoodie and camouflage pants, hurled seven Molotov cocktails into a local military recruiting center while the other recorded the incident — one of six recent arson attacks on Russian recruiting offices. Several of the attacks led to the arrests of young Russian men.

Russia’s 10-week-old military campaign was not supposed to come to this.

On the day of the invasion, a jubilant Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of state-owned RT, wisecracked that the Russian campaign was just “a standard parade rehearsal” for Victory Day. “It’s just that this year they decided to hold the parade in Kiev,” she tweeted, using the Russian spelling of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

In Ukrainian villages, whispers of collaboration with the Russians

But Russia’s efforts to fuse Victory Day — its celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War II — with a victory in its war against what Moscow calls “Nazis” in Ukraine fell flat with the failure to capture Kyiv. The occupation of the strategic Ukrainian port of Mariupol marks a rare Russian success, but the city’s bombed-out ruins make for a unpalatable backdrop for a parade. Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Russian presidential administration, ruled out an official Victory Day parade there Thursday.

Over the years, Putin has used the holiday to legitimize his increasingly authoritarian rule, exploiting the myth of Russia as a nation that never invaded anyone, fights only in self-defense and single-handedly saved the world from Nazis in World War II, at a staggering cost of 27 million Russian war dead.

“Putin is going to use this day to justify his war against Ukraine and to underline, as he believes, the historical mission of Russia to fight fascism. He has to legitimize his war, and he’s trying to present it to the world and to Russians as some kind of fight for historical justice,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, Paris-based head of R.Politik political consultancy, in an interview.

“The strategic problem that…