Celebration of the annexations: darkness where Putin wants to start

In Moscow should be celebrated. Later on Friday, crowds are expected to gather in Red Square for a concert “in support of the annexation of new territories to Russia,” according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. But if you head towards the Kremlin on the morning of the day when President Vladimir Putin will sign “treats” to annex four more Ukrainian regions, you will come across fences, police officers in dark blue uniforms and national guardsmen in gray spotted uniforms.

There is no getting through to Red Square. There is no holiday spirit. Hardly anyone smiles, not a policeman, not a passer-by. Buses are waiting in front of the black and gray building of the Duma, the lower house. The deputies will probably be taken in groups the few hundred meters to the Kremlin, where they will then be taken to the Georgievsky Hall. The same in which the annexation of Crimea was committed eight and a half years ago.

Parliamentarians are so rare in the Kremlin that they seem like tourists among the stalls, chandeliers and tsarist splendor. Like the crowds of state employees and students who are driven to Kremlin festivals like the annexation concert, they are the audience, staffage, decoration for Putin’s big, according to his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “extensive” performance.

Photos before the concert show structures on Red Square. On it are the Russian names of the areas that are now being annexed: “Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, Cherson”, plus “Russia!” and “Together forever!”. “People’s republics” were proclaimed in the first two areas in 2014, and Putin recognized them as “states” last February. Decrees followed on Thursday evening for the Cherson and Zaporizhia regions, with which Putin decreed “sovereignty” and “independence”. The areas are also to be connected as “states”.

Partial mobilization worries many Russians

From the Kremlin’s point of view, it would be logical for this to take place within the borders of the Ukrainian administrative areas. But Moscow does not fully control the oblasts, does not even control the oblast capital Zaporizhia; and in Kherson, another high-ranking occupier, who came from the Russian secret service FSB, has just been killed. The situation is unclear. On Friday morning, when asked about the borders of these two “new subjects”, Peskov only said that he still had to clarify that, and also admitted that the Donetsk region still had to be “liberated”. The Russian troops around the city of Lyman in the Donetsk region are said to be almost surrounded at this point – of all things, at the time of the annexation celebrations.

Most Russians are unlikely to hear much of such news. But many are disturbed by the “partial mobilization” that Putin announced last Wednesday. Even according to the Kremlin-affiliated polling agency FOM, the proportion of Russians who are “concerned” has skyrocketed from 35 percent before the mobilization to 69 percent now. The war, which seemed far away as a “special operation” running “according to plan”, moves into millions of families: fathers, sons, even the children’s teachers are called up. They are also recruited in the heart of Moscow, where until recently it was particularly easy to suppress the war.