RUSSIA is preparing for a huge Victory Day parade in Moscow to mark the 75th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis on the Eastern Front of World War II.
Pictures show jets, tanks, and missiles systems from the country’s military rehearsing for the event, now scheduled for June 24 after being postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The annual parade involves thousands of troops and gives the Russian government the opportunity to showcase its latest military hardware.
Photos showed jets from a number of aerobatics teams across the Russian Air Force flying alongside one another during preparations for the rescheduled event.
Visible were Mikoyan MiG-29UB fighter jets from the Swifts aerobatic team as well as Sukhoi Su-30SM jets from the Russian Knights.
Also seen were convoys of tanks and huge surface-to-air missile trucks rehearsing at night on the streets of the city of Vladivostok.
The event usually takes place on May 9, the date in 1945 on which the German government signed a declaration of unconditional surrender to the Allies in Berlin.
On April 16, President Vladimir Putin announced that the parade would be postponed for the first time in its history as governments around the world fought to slow the spread of coronavirus.
The rescheduled date of June 24 is the date on which Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov led a parade to mark the victory in 1945.
The virus is known to have a greater impact on the elderly, and representatives of the country’s World War II veterans had urged the government to postpone the event.
Putin instead marked the anniversary with a ceremony in which he laid a wreathe at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow and have a short speech honouring the 8.5million Soviet soldiers who died during the war.
Addressing a meeting of his national security advisors at the time, he said: “[The] risks associated with the epidemic, whose peak has not passed yet, are extremely high.”
“This does not give me the right to begin preparations for the parade and other mass events now”.
Russia has in recent weeks begun to ease a coronavirus lockdown imposed in late March, but concerns continue about the spread of the virus in the country.
When Putin announced that the parade would be postponed, just over 3,000 new cases were being diagnosed each day.
At present, the figure stands at just under 9,000, with little significant signs of decreasing numbers of infections of deaths.
Almost 500,000 people in the country have now tested positive for the virus, and at least 6,358 have died.
