Russia fears an attack and the start of a Ukrainian counter-offensive on Victory Day

A week after the military parade on May 9, Victory Day on Red Square, fears are growing in Russia of possible attacks and sabotage on its territory, and even that Ukraine will launch a counter-offensive spoil the fun. This is what many leaders, mercenaries and analysts like Boris Rozhin believe. “Offensive operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be aimed at somehow spoiling the celebration of May 9 in Russia,” Rozhin told the Russian news agency Tass. Andrej Maročko, the pro-Russian representative of the occupied areas of Luhansk, takes it for granted: “They are expected this weekend favorable weather conditions which will enable Ukrainian armed formations to fully utilize the equipment and weapons supplied to them by NATO countries.”

The leader of the mercenary group Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin hopes that the start of the Ukrainian offensive will not happen on that date. “Perhaps on May 9 they will give us a break, but by the 15th the offensive will be one hundred percent», he holds. On Monday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov announced that “everything is ready” and that it depends only on the General Staff, Commander-in-Chief Volodymyr Zelensky and his team “how, where and when” to launch the operation.

Russian authorities have already closed Red Square, where the main parade commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 will take place, given the increase in attacks and sabotage in recent days in Russian regions bordering Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. “We are aware that the regime in Kiev, which is behind a series of terrorist attacks, plans to continue his line. All our special services do everything necessary to ensure safety. Intensive work is underway,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said on Tuesday, reports Efe.

For security reasons, except in Crimea and Sevastopol, military parades were canceled in the border regions of Kursk and Belgorod, but the Kremlin decided to keep the one in Moscow.

In the absence of success on the battlefield and on the eve of such an important day, it is essential that President Vladimir Putin can rally the troops and try to maintain the unity of the Russians.

Even as the head of Wagner’s mercenaries admits that the battle for Bakhmut, the only Russian offensive currently on the front, is being fought at a heavy cost in lives, averaging close to a hundred every day, by his own reckoning.

“Invented” victims

The Kremlin this Tuesday denied the United States’ calculations of Russian casualties in Ukraine, calling them “absolutely fabricated.” According to White House spokesman John Kirby, 20,000 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine since last December, half of whom were Wagner’s mercenaries, and 80,000 were injured.

Most of those casualties occurred in the fighting in the besieged city of Bakhmut, a front where Ukrainian forces will launch a counterattack, forcing the Russians to «leave some positionsaccording to what Ukrainian ground forces commander Oleksandr Sirskiy said Tuesday, as he visited soldiers fighting in that city in Donetsk province on Tuesday.