The war in Ukraine, Europe’s deadliest since World War Two, haunts the celebration.
Some 1,500 of the 11,000 troops on Red Square have fought in Ukraine and drones – the biggest technological innovation of the war – were due to be paraded for the first time.
Ukraine attacked Moscow with drones for several days this week, though there were no reports of major attacks on Russia on Friday amid a 72-hour ceasefire declared by Putin.
Moscow and Kyiv do not publish accurate casualty numbers for the war in Ukraine, though US President Donald Trump, who says he wants peace, says hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed and injured.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, including many millions in Ukraine, but pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
Chinese Communist Party historians say China’s casualties in the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War were 35 million. The Japanese occupation caused the displacement of as many as 100 million Chinese people and significant economic hardship, as well as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, during which an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 victims were killed.
