Free Republic

Ukrainian drones on Wednesday attacked St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on the opening day of an annual economic conference that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to cultivate into a showcase of a modern and prosperous country. It was the second time in a month that Ukraine had struck a major Russian city before an event important to Mr. Putin, as Kyiv expands a campaign of long-range strikes aimed at inflicting economic damage on Russia and demonstrating its vulnerability to attacks. In early May, Ukrainian forces hit sites in Moscow, including a high-rise apartment building near the city center, days...

If symbolism matters, and in Russia it always has, then today’s Victory Day parade on Red Square spoke volumes. The absence of tanks grinding across the sacred cobblestones was not merely an omission; it was an admission. A regime that once flaunted military might before the world could muster neither armour, missiles, nor meaningful battlefield hardware for its most important national spectacle. For a country that has built so much of its modern identity around martial power, this was less a celebration of victory than a carefully stage-managed display of strategic exhaustion. When Vladimir Putin resurrected and expanded the Victory...