Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Putin's Parade Has Been Rained Out

The Russian leader's geopolitical games have left him more isolated than before.

May 9, 2017 at 3:15 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Lonely man.
Photographer: Alexei Nikolsky/TASS via Getty Images

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Every year, the Russian military puts on a display of military might on May 9 dedicated to the Soviet Union's World War II victory. This year, it is being hyped in a banner headline on the Drudge Report, a leading right-leaning news site in the U.S., as an impressive show of force of Russian President Vladimir Putin's power:

Yet it took place under skies so overcast that the aerial part of the spectacle had to be canceled, despite an outlay of several million dollars to dispel clouds. The symbolism is tacky but uncanny: With European elections and Washington politics going the way they are, Putin has little to celebrate.