Matthew Sussex

Well, look, this is an event that mobilises Moscow to come out and watch an enormously long parade with troops, with tanks, with self-propelled guns, with lots of missiles on trailers.

Putin is there.

Last year, for instance, he had Xi Jinping in attendance.

On this occasion, though, much more subdued.

The Ukrainians have now a series of different drone types that can go large distances, as well as their own indigenously made cruise missile called the Flamingo.

And that can reach deep into Russian territory.

And the Ukrainians have been using these systems to mainly attack Russian oil distribution ports.

And it's reckoned that, you know, these are sort of sanctions by other means, I suppose.

given that Donald Trump decided to relax sanctions on Russia in terms of oil after launching the Iran war.

But these sanctions and other means have taken about 40% of Russia's oil production capacity, and that's really significant.

But what's more significant, of course, is that Russian air defences aren't good enough to make sure that targets are safe from these drones.

And despite pulling an enormous amount of resources into Moscow, there was still no guarantees that if the Ukrainians decided to have a go at the parade, then some drones and missiles wouldn't get through.

Well, it was seriously abridged.

It lasted only 45 minutes.

There were no tanks.

There was no sort of mobile military column, which is what typically the Russians have done with, you know, missiles and so forth.

There were very few foreign leaders who attended, but he also banned parliament members from attending.

And instead of having a sort of big parade, instead they showed videos of Russian sort of military technologies, which, you know, in itself says, well, we're not safe enough to get these out on the streets, but we got to look at them instead.

I think there's a temptation to jump to conclusions here and say that this is Putin signalling that he wants peace.

I think Putin does want the war to end, but he still wants it to end on his terms or on terms that are more favourable than he has now.