The Kremlin said Tuesday 29 foreign leaders — among them China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — will attend its May 9 parade, in a list including at least two territories not internationally recognised as countries.
There has been mounting speculation over the parade, which Russia said will be its grandest to date, evoking the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II to rally support for its troops fighting in Ukraine.
Kyiv hit Moscow with drones on Tuesday, three days before the event.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said troops from 13 countries — including China, Egypt, Vietnam, Myanmar and several ex-Soviet countries — will march in the Red Square parade, taking place three years into Moscow’s Ukraine offensive.
Kyiv on Tuesday warned foreign troops not to march alongside Russian soldiers on Red Square, saying this would equate to “sharing responsibility” for Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico are the only European leaders who will attend the event. Fico defied warnings from Brussels not to go.
Moscow said leaders from Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Vietnam, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Congo, Myanmar, Cuba, Ethiopia and Equatoral Guinea will join Russia’s traditional allies from Central Asia for the parade.
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, decades-old rivals, will both attend the parade, as well as the heads of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two separatist pro-Russian territories of Georgia, which are not recognized by the international community.
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