Putin’s Ruse: Do Not Fall For It.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

— George Orwell

Whether or not Putin meets Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky in Istanbul, the Russian dictator or his delegation will be desperate to portray strength while making false promises of cooperation to Russia’s former ally, the United States.

Those were the themes of the annual Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, marking 80 years since Nazi Germany’s surrender in World War II. Victory Day is an important holiday for the nation as the Kremlin uses the defeat of Nazi Germany to evoke national pride and demonstrate Russian military prowess. But like the fake Potemkin villages built as façades to impress Catherine the Great, Victory Day demonstrations of military hardware are meant to mask profound weaknesses in contemporary Russia. Putin has also used Victory Day to advance a myth that Washington and Moscow are natural allies in a fight to defend Western Civilization from those who promote progressive liberal agendas.

The fervor surrounding this year’s celebration was commensurate with the Kremlin’s desperation to present Putin as a respected world leader, and to conceal Russia’s isolation, military failures, and domestic problems.

A Kremlin press release described the show in detail:

Military contingents from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt, China, Laos, Mongolia, and Myanmar also took part in the Victory Parade. The mechanised column was led by the legendary T-34 Victory Tank and SU-100 self-propelled artillery units. The Tigr-M and VPK-Ural armoured vehicles, Linza armoured medical vehicles, BRM-1K reconnaissance vehicles, BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers, BMP-2M, BMP-3 and Kurganets-25 infantry fighting vehicles, BMD-4 and BTR-MDM Rakushka airborne infantry fighting vehicles, as well as main battle tanks T-72B3M, T-80BVM and T-90M Proryv were part of the mechanised column as well. Missile and artillery units showcased self-propelled artillery systems, Iskander-M precision missile systems, the S-400 Triumf air defence complex, and Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launchers. For the first time, the parade presented unmanned aerial vehicles and loitering munitions, including the Orlan, Lancet, Garpiya and Geran drones. The parade concluded with the renowned Kubinka Diamond formation of Su-30 and MiG-29 fighter jets from the Russkiye Vityazi (Russian Knights) and Strizhi (Swifts) aerobatic teams. Closing the flyover, Su-25 attack aircraft painted the sky in the colours of the Russian national flag. The music accompaniment for the parade was provided by the combined military orchestra of the Moscow Garrison.

The man who presided over the Victory Day spectacle is a failed war leader who has caused an estimated 900,000 Russians to be killed or wounded.

Putin’s guestlist was meant to portray him as a respected world leader. CNN bought the ruse, reporting “a significant upgrade to last year’s guestlist which was limited to a handful of delegations from post-Soviet states, Cuba and a few other countries.” This year’s attendees, however, were not impressive, and the attention and deference paid to Xi Jinping highlighted Moscow’s utter dependence on the Middle Kingdom. Putin’s economy as well as his war effort sits on the brink of failure.

In Istanbul, Putin is likely to evoke the VE-Day parade to bolster his effort to deceive Trump with the false hope that Russia, based on its alignment with the allies in World World II, might be brought in from the cold if only the United States would allay Moscow’s security concerns and address what the Kremlin describes as the “root causes” of the war it has waged on Ukraine since 2014. In an Orwellian “reversal of the truth,” Putin strives to liken his unprovoked war against Ukraine as analogous to the fight to defend the Russian motherland from the German Nazi regime in World War II.

Putin will accompany his ludicrous play to portray Russia as a natural ally of the United States with professed alignment with President Trump against various postmodernist or “woke” globalists who are undermining Western Civilization and promoting soft-headed cosmopolitanism over national identity. Consider this analysis from Battlegrounds of the two rationalizations Trump heard in 2017 from those who had succumbed to Putin’s deception:

For some of the self-proclaimed strategists around President Trump, the pursuit of improved U.S.-Russian relations despite continued Russian aggression was based mainly on two rationalizations: first, a misunderstanding of history and an associated nostalgia for the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II; and second, a peculiar sense of kinship with and affinity for Russian nationalists. This latter rationalization is based on a perceived commonality of interest in confronting Islamist terrorism and protecting what these Trump strategists regarded as wholesome and predominantly Western, Caucasian, and Christian cultures from dilution through multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious immigration. In a July 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News, President Trump said that the characterization of Russia as an adversary was “incredible” because of the country’s tremendous sacrifices during World War II. “Russia lost 50 million people and helped us win the war,” President Trump said. Some Americans and Europeans view Russia as the repository of a purer version of Christianity and, under Putin, a bastion of conservatism that is protecting Western civilization from postmodern ideas that are anathema to some conservatives.

But both rationalizations are fundamentally flawed. The alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II was an “alliance of necessity.” In the midst of that war, Russia had initially tried to stay out of the conflict by signing the cynical Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the brutal dismemberment of Poland and the inevitable annexation by the Soviet Union of the three Baltic states. It was only when Nazi Germany turned on its accomplices that the Soviets found themselves unexpectedly fighting on the side of the Western Allies and (after the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 1941) the United States. It was an alliance that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had tried his best to avoid; he had been hostile to the governments and people of the West. The only factor that held the unlikely allies together was Adolf Hitler. And while it is true that the Soviet Union bore the largest sacrifice of fighting in terms of lives lost, once the war ended, the alliance of necessity dissolved and gave way to a cold war between the two powers.

Despite the U.S. desire to regard Russia as an erstwhile ally grateful for American bloodshed for a common cause and the $11.3 billion in U.S. assistance under the Lend-Lease policy, Russia’s memory of the alliance in World War II does not evoke warm feelings among Kremlin leaders. Some Russians view U.S. and U.K. delays in opening a second front in France as an intentional effort to allow the Soviets and the Germans to bleed each other to death on the Eastern Front. And they believe their exclusion from the joint American-British effort to build an atomic bomb as part of a plan to dominate the Soviet Union and the postwar world. If the prospect of improved relations with Putin relied on a natural confluence of interests with respect to Europe or to Russian nostalgia for the World War II alliance against Nazi Germany, that prospect was dim.

Ignorance of history combined with bigotry to generate another source of delusional thinking about Putin’s Russia. Some Americans were easy targets for Russian disinformation because they felt a kinship with and a cultural affinity for Russia as a defender of social conservatism and Christianity. That basis for optimism about improved relations with the Kremlin was not confined to the United States; it was even more prevalent in parts of Europe. For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban expressed alignment with Russia, declaring that Hungary would be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West” in order to build a “new Hungarian state.”

Some saw Putin as a modern-day crusader who was protecting Christianity from Islamist terrorists after U.S. interventions in the Middle East made the world less secure. The Russian Orthodox Church, which acts as an arm of the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services, praised Putin’s intervention in Syria as part of the “fight with terrorism” and a “holy battle.” Russia actively cultivates these feelings of racial and religious kinship to further polarize and weaken Western resolve to confront the Kremlin’s aggression.

Putin is in a position of profound weakness. In Istanbul, he or his people will employ every tool of deception at their disposal. But President Trump and his advisors will have seen and heard all of it before. The history they know will help them recognize Putin’s ruse. That recognition might help him see the first step in forcing Putin to acknowledge the damage he has done to his own nation and that his only viable option is to end his war on Ukraine.