“Today, civilisation is again at a decisive turning point,” he said.
“A real war has been unleashed against our homeland.
“We have repulsed international terrorism, we will protect the inhabitants of Donbas, we will ensure our security.”
In a 10-minute speech in Red Square for Victory Day, Mr Putin repeated familiar messages he has delivered many times in the nearly 15 months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Mr Putin has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine — which he casts as a defensive move against a West which wants to carve up Russia — to the challenge Moscow faced when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
He said “Western globalist elites” were sowing Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, while the Ukrainian people had become “hostages to a state coup” and to the ambitions of the West.
He did not address the challenges facing Russia as its forces prepared for an expected major counter-offensive by Ukraine, or outline any path to victory.
Vladimir Putin attends Russia’s Victory Day parade on Red Square.
The speech, followed by a huge military parade across Red Square, was taking place following a wave of strikes inside Russia this month — including a purported drone attack on the Kremlin citadel itself less than a week ago.
Victory Day is one of the most important public holidays in Russia, when people commemorate the huge sacrifices made by the Soviet Union during what is called the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, in which around 27 million citizens perished.
Cheers rang out across Red Square, with a gun salute and the Russian national anthem, though with a much slimmed-down show of military hardware — and no aviation. Only one tank took part.
Victory Day
No Western leaders attended Tuesday’s parade, which was much reduced in scale and came less than a week after Russia said Ukraine had attacked the Kremlin with two drones in an attempt to kill Mr Putin. Kyiv denied any involvement.
Mr Putin said the memory of World War II was sacred and paid tribute to those who fought against Nazis, including the armies of the United States and Britain, and also to China’s fight against the Japanese.
Along with the 1812 defeat of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the crushing of Nazi Germany is Russia’s most revered military triumph, though both catastrophic invasions from the West left Russia deeply sensitive about its Western borders.
“We want to see a peaceful, free and stable future,” Mr Putin said, adding that memorials to Soviet soldiers were being destroyed in a number of countries.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II, including many millions in Ukraine, but eventually pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
Kyiv and its allies accuse Putin of waging an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine to seize land. They deny Putin’s claim that the expansion of the NATO alliance to Russia’s borders poses a threat to its security or justifies Moscow’s invasion.
As many as 354,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the Ukraine war, which is now in its 15th month and could well grind on well beyond 2023, according to a trove of purported US intelligence documents posted online.