On May 8 and 9, so-called Immortal Regiment marches were staged across dozens of countries, with crowds carrying portraits of Russian relatives who died in World War II. The significance is far greater than mere commemoration; however, the Kremlin-aided parades represent a key regime propaganda event.
Started as a grassroots initiative by three journalists in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 2012, the march spread rapidly. By 2015, it had reached 100 Russian cities and 15 countries, and President Vladimir Putin joined the Moscow procession carrying a portrait of his grandfather.
By 2025, when the world marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Kremlin had fully appropriated the Immortal Regiment, transforming what had once been a civil ritual.
The Victory Day cult, the central nation-building narrative of Putin’s Russia, portrays the Soviet Union as the principal liberator of Europe from Nazism, and enshrines the sacrifice of the Soviet people as a defining national experience. By 2025, the Immortal Regiment movement had evolved into pobedobesie, or victory mania, in its most aggressive and jingoistic form.
For many Russians, the war in Ukraine, now grinding into its fifth year, has become inseparable from that narrative. Casualties mount, propaganda plays on, and the two have fused in the public imagination into a single story of a people both martyred and triumphant.
The faces of soldiers who stormed Nazi positions have been joined in the march by portraits of men killed in what the Kremlin calls its special military operation in Ukraine and in the campaigns of the Wagner Group. The orange-and-black St. George ribbon, for generations a symbol of wartime sacrifice, now appears alongside the Z and V insignia of the Ukraine invasion and the flags of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
In Moscow, however, the Immortal Regiment has moved online for the second year running. The 2026 Victory Day parade was scaled back significantly as well, with no military hardware on display and the persistent threat of Ukrainian drone attacks hanging over the capital. Elsewhere across Russia’s regions, the Regiment took many forms: participants marched through city streets, floated down the Moika and Irtysh rivers, drove in convoy through Omsk, and took to the skies on helicopters in Magadan. The biggest turnout was in St. Petersburg, where roughly one million people joined the march.
Beyond Russia’s borders, the picture grows considerably more complex. The march has gone truly global, drawing participants across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, as well as in many European countries and a number of post-Soviet states where it has been officially banned or restricted. This year’s Victory Day celebrations saw those restrictions openly defied in some countries, including Belarus, Moldova, and Germany.
France has charted a different course entirely. The country has not only refrained from restricting Soviet military and Russian symbols on such occasions, but has also issued permits for Immortal Regiment processions. In recent years, those marches have become something more contentious: part confrontation between pro-Kremlin diaspora groups and Ukrainian activists, part political stage for French radical organizations.
In 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Paris prefecture approved not one but two Immortal Regiment marches, both departing from the same location and following the same route, two hours apart. Many regular participants were visibly confused, unsure which procession was which.
To the average Parisian, the two were barely distinguishable: both featured a similar array of flags — Soviet, Russian, the flag of the French Resistance, Kazakh, and Belarusian — and both moved to the standard soundtrack of Soviet wartime songs.
Why the Kremlin would open its most sacred commemorative ritual to French fringe radicals is not immediately obvious. The broader pattern, however, is familiar.
Moscow has a well-documented record of cultivating ties with French radical movements, from the Les Gilets Jaunes to Marine Le Pen’s Le Rassemblement National, along with fellow travelers such as Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of Charles de Gaulle and a guest at the 2025 Moscow Victory Day parade.
The ambitions of French radical groups are equally transparent: with the 2027 presidential election on the horizon and Marine Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella leading the polls, courting the Russian-speaking electorate has become an attractive political calculation. Germany’s AfD, which has long targeted Russian-speaking voters in its campaigns, offers a ready precedent.
For the Kremlin, however, the gamble carries risks. Rather than consolidating the Russian-speaking diaspora, the strategy has fractured a community that had previously been willing to align with Russia’s state institutions in France.
The French laissez-faire approach may well prove to be one of the possible scenarios for the natural defragmentation of the part of the Kremlin-aligned, Russian-speaking diaspora in Europe. Outright bans may not be effective: The desire to march often lies in something simpler than political allegiance: the inability to articulate memory in any language other than the Soviet victory narrative.
In such cases, local authorities might do well to consider deploying their own soft power — crafting a new commemorative narrative around World War II, that is adjusted to national history and memory, yet expansive enough not to exclude local Russian speakers.
Some in Estonia have already called for precisely this kind of moderately integrationist approach. At least part of the French Russian-speaking community that commemorates its relatives through the Immortal Regiment appears, for its part, to be finding this path on its own.
Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a CEPA Russia Future Fellow, a researcher at the University of Lille, and an Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po, France. Her expertise covers identity-making in Eastern Europe and Russia, biopolitics, illiberalism, and memory. She served as a researcher in Europe and USA, including the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Polish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw, Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and others. She is the author of the “Biopolitics and Illiberalism: A Critical Approach to Putin’s Russia”, “Mnemonic security and post-Soviet aphasia: Soviet monuments in Estonian media after Russian invasion of Ukraine”, “Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: From Populations to Nations”, and others.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
