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Russian Officers Told to Bring Dress Uniforms for Kyiv Victory Parade
The past is our tour guide through the present and future but only if we are willing to listen
There are a few things that Russia does not do well. It does not know how to cope with losing wars and it never regards the lessons of history as the potentially priceless pearls of wisdom they often turn out to be.
Let’s begin with the second lesson.
Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv (The Inside Story of Catastrophe).
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when this officer was telling his wife he needed his dress uniform:
“Honey, we will be in Kyiv in a week and then there will be a huge celebration. Just fold up my dress uniform carefully and I can get it pressed in Kyiv at the hotel.”
What this soldier should have done, the moment he was told to bring his “dress blues” with him was head off to the local museum.
If you have never been to the “Defense of Leningrad Museum” in St. Petersburg, Russia then you won’t know that in the possessions of one dead German officer was found a delightfully-designed ticket for the “Victory Ball” Nazi war planners had printed out in Berlin long before the invasion.
Having been to that museum over my 30 years in Russia around a dozen times, I can tell it was always a moment of real glee seeing how the hubris of fascist Germany was so rudely slapped down by the defenders of Leningrad. For 900 days, the people of the city held back the German forces who encircled the city from the autumn of 1941. Millions died from bombings and starvation but the defenders held on.
I can tell you that in all of my years of going there, often in the middle of winter to add to my appreciation of the artifacts, to add some brutal realism to the air raid sirens that sporadically blast through the rooms of the small museum, I seldom came across any Russians — just the random survivor seeking…
