Charles Maines

All my male colleagues had already gone.

The older people in the office said, are you an idiot?

What are you still doing here?

You're of military draft age.

Get out now before mobilization begins.

This was the scene last May.

I was on Red Square watching goose-stepping soldiers, missiles, and tanks as they marched and rumbled over the dark cobblestones.

All of it for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

And yet what I kept hearing about was another victory, one that hadn't happened yet, over fascism in Ukraine.

Our grandparents did everything to defeat the Nazi threat and will do the same now that it's raised its head again, said Yevgeny Viltin, a lieutenant colonel in the Russian army.

Yulia Belikova said her son was proudly serving on the front while she worked with military families at home.

We know what we're doing and why, she told me.

I also ran into Alexander Borodai, a key figure in Russia's initial shadow war in eastern Ukraine more than a decade ago, before the full-scale invasion.

Now a member of parliament and sanctioned by the West, Borodai told me he still didn't know when, but victory in Ukraine was coming.

Yes, it's taken longer and been harder than we would have liked in Ukraine, thanks to interference by the West, said Baradai.

But we'll get there, and we're willing to pay any price.

In today's Russia, history can feel like a feedback loop.

The past echoed, amplified, and accelerated to distort the present.

For four years, in speech after speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn parallels between the fight against Nazis then and the current military campaign against supposed fascists in Kyiv.

And for four years, the Kremlin leader has insisted Russians remain united behind the war effort in Ukraine, one that's dragged on far longer than many predicted, even longer than the Soviet Union's battles against Hitler's armies.