Among the high days and holy days in the calendar of Putin’s Russia, no festival ranks above Moscow’s Victory Day parade.
This annual celebration on May 9 marks the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany. Traditionally Red Square is filled with arsenals of missiles and rocket launchers, battalions of battle tanks and armoured vehicles, thousands of troops and ranks of dignitaries. Last year, more than two dozen foreign heads of state attended.
But not this year. After more than four years of war with Ukraine, the Kremlin has been forced to scale back the parade radically, reducing the show of force to a mere token display.
This is a bitter humiliation for Vladimir Putin, and also a symptom of his mounting paranoia. Under his reign, Victory Day has typically been a bombastic and pompous exercise in performative patriotism. The decision to mute it is the clearest outward sign of the triple crisis that now grips the regime he has ruled since coming to power in 1999.
Partly, it is the inevitable result of massive Russian losses on the Ukrainian front. For the past five months, casualties have averaged around 1,000 men per day, with more troops lost to the ‘meat grinder’ than the most aggressive recruitment policy can replace.
By one plausible estimate, more than 1.3million Russians have been killed or wounded. The toll in weaponry is almost beyond counting: nearly 12,000 tanks have been destroyed, more than 40,000 artillery systems, around 800 aircraft and about 35 ships and submarines. Putin’s generals can scarcely spare the troops and equipment for the parade.
Nor do they wish to take the risk. The Russian capital has come under attack from Ukrainian drones on several nights this week, with one upmarket apartment block about six miles from Red Square hit by a strike. Vnukovo and Domodedovo international airports have seen operations temporarily suspended.
The city’s Pantsir-S surface-to-air missile system is proving to be an increasingly uncertain defence: the majority of incoming drones are shot down or jammed, but like the Ukrainians, the Russians are learning that, however good the air defences may be, some attacks will get through.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is taking desperate steps to stay alive, writes Mark Galeotti
Russian officers gather in front of the State History Museum in Moscow on May 6, 2026
Russian jets release smoke in the colours of the Russian flag while flying towards St. Basil’s Cathedral on May 6, 2026 during a flypast rehearsal for a military parade which marks the 81st anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany
Any successful attack on the Victory Day parade would be shattering for Putin. The potential loss of billions of roubles-worth of equipment would be horrific enough. The propaganda blow would be far worse.
Last Monday, the Kremlin declared a unilateral ceasefire for May 8 and 9, to cover the celebrations. Ukraine would face appalling repercussions if it failed to respect this rule, Putin said, warning he would launch a massive retaliatory missile attack on Kyiv.
This statement was met with bitter mockery by Ukrainians, whose homes have come under frequent missile blitzes for years.
President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed it as an admission from Moscow that they were afraid of ‘drones over Red Square’ and added: ‘This is telling. We need to keep up the pressure.’
But there is a third factor at play here, one that gives the deepest insight yet into Putin’s devious thinking. He has seen how the world’s strongman leaders are being toppled or becoming targets for assassination. And he knows that even an unsuccessful attempt on his life could oust him from power.
Earlier this year, US special forces seized Venezuela’s psychotic dictator Nicolas Maduro in a surgical strike that penetrated the defences of his compound almost before his bodyguards knew the Americans were there.
Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores are being held in a maximum security prison in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
Weeks later, a joint operation by the US and Israel wiped out the Iranian high command, including the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His son Mojtaba is now nominally the head of the government, but he is rumoured to be gravely wounded and undergoing treatment in a Russian hospital, after suffering major injuries in the attack that killed his father.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Pictured on May 4) said Moscow is afraid of ‘drones over Red Square’
Moscow apartment building following a Ukrainian drone strike on May 4, 2026. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said no casualties were reported
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Putin’s decision to hold parade with no military equipment suggests Ukraine may have the upper hand
It is highly unlikely that Putin could be killed in a similar attack. This would require bunker-busting bombs and air power far beyond anything available to the Ukrainians – and American or European involvement in such an assassination mission would almost inevitably lead to World War Three.
And much as many countries, Ukraine most of all, would love to see Putin airlifted out to face trial in the Hague for war crimes, that notion could only work in Hollywood.
Nonetheless, Putin will be constantly reviewing and upgrading his personal security, because this is how he has survived in power throughout the 21st century. When I lived in Russia – before the Kremlin banned me from entry in 2022 – the presidential motorcade sometimes drove past my apartment block and I was able to see the levels of protection.
The roads were always cleared at least three hours in advance. Every manhole cover was lifted to guard against ambush attacks and every inch of the way inspected for potential bombs. There were armed guards on the doors of every building and snipers on every roof.
These precautions were enforced every time Putin’s limousine convoy raced past. The weapons carried by his bodyguards have evolved in recent years to include anti-drone guns, with built-in electronic jammers to protect him from the skies.
Even with all these defences bristling around him, he rarely visits Moscow. Instead, he stays in his country homes around the city or further afield, in residences that are all built as much for security as their glitzy opulence. Details of one underground bunker were published online several years ago by the contractor, Metrostil, apparently to boast about the excellence of their construction work. Metrostil, perhaps unsurprisingly, is now defunct. The plans hint at a multi-level complex of tunnels snaking out from the so-called Palace of Putin, a £1billion presidential resort on the Black Sea coast. The blast-proof concrete walls are 15 inches thick, and the 6,000 square feet of subterranean real estate has two independent oxygen supply systems, vast stockpiles of food and water, multiple generators, and enough fibre-optics for a full-size military command centre.
In a touch worthy of a Bond villain, there is even a lift and moving walkway leading to an escape hatch that opens on to the coastline, for a getaway by submarine.
Last year, investigators from Radio Free Europe analysed footage of Putin being interviewed, supposedly in his office at Novo-Ogaryovo in the Moscow suburbs. They concluded he had at least three identical rooms in different locations, so he can appear to be in the capital when, in fact, he is deep underground hundreds of miles away.
Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council via a video link at the Kremlin on May 8, 2026
The tiniest discrepancies revealed this subterfuge: for example, a door handle was an inch lower in one room than another, and on his polished wooden desks two in-trays appeared to have ever so subtly different grains.
These rooms can be nearly 1,000 miles apart. When Putin flies between then, he is accompanied by an escort of fighter jets, his luxury personal plane even armed with laser defences to dazzle incoming rockets.
This is not enough to assuage his paranoia: he will be aware that when a plane is blown apart by a bomb, no amount of technology can save the passengers.
He ought to know this better than most – after all, his traitorous ex-ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, former head of the mercenary Wagner Group, was assassinated on board a plane three years ago after leading and then abandoning a coup against Putin. Instead, the president often travels by train. He is not the only dictator to prefer rail to planes: when North Korean despot Kim Jong Un visits Moscow, he goes by train across Siberia. Carriages can be derailed but they are more likely to survive attack.
Putin’s private train looks like any other Russian rolling stock on the outside, apart from a bulge on the roof that houses the satellite communications equipment. But inside, it is a highly luxurious armoured car. When he’s on the move, foreign intelligence agencies will be tipped off by unusual activity on the rail network, as long sections are closed down to public traffic. Unexpected cancellations indicate the presence of Putin’s so-called ‘ghost train’.
Wherever he goes, his staff are forbidden to carry mobile phones, or any other device that connects to the internet, for fear that they will be implanted with listening software by foreign spy agencies.
And following an extraordinarily effective strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon by Israel’s security service Mossad, which involved concealing explosives in phones and pagers, Putin’s minders are wary of any handsets being turned into devastating bombs.
His inner circle, including chefs and bodyguards, as well as official photographers, are said to be forbidden to use public transport, to make it more difficult for watchers to track him via their movements. Their homes are monitored with surveillance cameras.
I can also reveal security has been stepped up for ten of Russia’s most senior generals, following the assassination of Lieutenant-General Fanil Sarvarov, who was killed by a car bomb on a Moscow street last December.
In order to give the impression that Putin is conducting business as normal, footage of him in Moscow is released at intervals as though it is current, when it might have been shot months earlier. Kremlin business is now anything but normal. Putin’s interest in domestic politics and the running of the country is minimal.
He spends about three-quarters of his time studying the progress of the war, discussing strategy with military advisers and taking a close interest in daily details – mapping the co-ordinates of villages where the fighting is fiercest, for instance.
Russian officials who are granted an audience will be physically searched by Federal Protection Service officers and subjected to chemical and electronic scans to check for any signs of recent contact with explosives or hidden surveillance kit. There will also be rigorous identity checks to root out imposters.
The other quarter of Putin’s time will be taken up with international business. Ambassadors and visiting heads of state are unlikely to have to endure close physical searches, and might be permitted to keep their phones, but any diplomatic gifts are pulled to pieces before they are allowed anywhere near the president.
It is not simply that Putin fears assassination. Even a near miss could puncture his carefully cultivated aura of invincibility.
Donald Trump’s image has been strengthened by attempts on his life, particularly the shot that left him bloodied but defiant on a podium in Pennsylvania in 2024.
Pictured: President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC on May 8, 2026
But America is a democracy. Russia is a dictatorship. Putin rules through fear, not popularity. He cannot afford for people to see him vulnerable. Neither could his predecessor, Josef Stalin, who survived several assassination bids and made sure that the population never learned of them.
After Stalin died in 1953, the head of his secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, attempted to seize power and was blocked by the army. Putin, whose appetite for Russian history is boundless, has studied that episode and drawn from it a lesson that illustrates the intensity of his paranoia.
Determined to let no modern-day Berias emerge, he keeps weak and elderly men in the top jobs. They are to block the rise of younger and more ruthless rivals.
The absence of any obvious successor among his inner circle is one such way he guards against treachery. But it is one more guarantee that, when Putin finally falls, Russia is likely to tear itself apart.
Mark Galeotti is Honorary Professor at the University College London school of Slavonic and East European Studies and the author of 24 books on Russia, including a biography of Vladimir Putin.
