No Tanks on Red Square: Russia's Hollowed-Out Victory Day Parade Unfolds Under a Fragile Trump Ceasefire

No Tanks on Red Square: Russia's Hollowed-Out Victory Day Parade Unfolds Under a Fragile Trump Ceasefire

Putin stood at the podium on Saturday for the 81st anniversary of the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany, but the parade behind him told a different story than the ones he's staged for years. For the first time in nearly two decades, no tanks, no missiles, no heavy weaponry rolled across Red Square. Officials cited the "current operational situation" and the threat of Ukrainian attacks as the reason for the stripped-down format — leaving only a flyover of combat jets where columns of armor used to be.

What filled the gap was its own kind of signal: for the first time ever, North Korean troops marched in the parade, a formal tribute to Pyongyang's decision to send soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region, where Ukraine had pushed across the border. Putin, speaking to the assembled troops, declared that Russian forces "face an aggressive force that is armed and supported by the entire bloc of NATO," and added: "Victory has always been and will be ours."

The parade unfolded under a U.S.-brokered three-day ceasefire — covering Saturday through Monday — that Trump announced on Friday. Both Zelenskyy and Putin's foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov confirmed the agreement, which also includes an exchange of 1,000 prisoners by each side. It is a more durable-looking truce than the ones that immediately preceded it: Russia had declared a ceasefire for Friday and Saturday that collapsed almost instantly, and a Ukrainian unilateral ceasefire earlier in the week fared no better, with each side blaming the other for continued attacks. Trump called the pause potentially "the beginning of the end" of a war now in its fifth year — though he has swung between optimism and fatalism on that question before.

Gobble's Take: When a superpower quietly removes its own tanks from its most important military parade, the absence says more about the state of the war than any speech from the podium.

Sources: NPR World · NPR World

The Pentagon Comptroller Put a $25 Billion Price Tag on Iran. Economists Say the Real Number Is Already Triple That — and Climbing.

While testifying before Congress last week alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Pentagon comptroller Jules "Jay" Hurst offered a $25 billion figure for the cost of Operation Epic Fury. Economists were not impressed. University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers called it "the Pentagon's lowball $25 billion estimate" in a New York Times opinion piece on Friday, arguing the figure only captures direct hardware costs — the more than 2,000 Tomahawk and Patriot missiles already fired, the warplanes flown and in some cases lost, and the equipment consumed. It does not count the war's wider economic damage.

Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated the U.S. government spent at least $71.8 billion in just the first two months of the conflict — roughly $1.2 billion per day. Wolfers catalogued the collateral damage: oil markets disrupted, consumer confidence cratered, and "the global economy groaning." The human costs — death, disability, and mental health consequences — "could become much more dramatic should President Trump send troops into Iran, which still can't be ruled out." His bottom line: the war "will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions."

On stated objectives, the scorecard is stark. Iran's nuclear capability has not budged since last summer. The regime is now composed of more hard-liners than before. And the administration has maintained its naval blockade and continued strikes even after Trump told Congress the operation had been "terminated."

Gobble's Take: When the comptroller testifying next to the defense secretary lowballs a war's cost by a factor of three in the first sixty days, "terminated" starts to sound like a billing category, not a ceasefire.

Source: r/Economics

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• "Something Fundamental Has Broken": Europe Faces a NATO Without America
• Leaked CIA Dossier Says Iran Has 70% of Its Missiles Left. Trump Said 18%.
• Kim Jong Un Points New Guns at Seoul, Commissions First Destroyer
• Samsung Workers Turn Down $340,000 Because Rivals Get $900,000 — and Strike Anyway