Kazakhstan’s Defense Ministry has cancelled commemorative events, including a military parade, on May 9 to mark the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Political and economic factors appear to have played a role in the decision.
Victory Day, as the May 9 celebration is known across the former Soviet Union, has become Russia’s primary state holiday in the years since 1991. Elsewhere in the former Soviet empire, the occasion has receded in significance. In Kazakhstan, a military parade hasn’t been on May 9 since 2019. Even so, commemorative events honoring veterans have continued to be staged across the country.
Defense Ministry officials call it a cost-savings decision. The funds used to commemorate May 9 will instead go to “solve other problems,” including “maintaining the required level of combat readiness and mobility of units of the Armed Forces of Kazakhstan,” Kazakh media reported. The Defense Ministry added that the cost of previous May 9 ceremonies reached 4 billion tenge, or about $9 million.
The first two cancellations of the Victory Day military parade in 2020 and 2021 were attributed to Covid pandemic precautions. Since then, the Defense Ministry has cited the prohibitive cost.
Political observers in Kazakhstan believe geopolitics is a significant factor in the downplaying of Victory Day. Some say the continuing lack of May 9 festivities is a sign of the Kazakh government’s unease with Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, adding that officials don’t want to send any signals that could be interpreted as endorsing Russian actions. At the same time, many worry about the possibility of the Kremlin making territorial claims against northern Kazakhstan once Russian military operations in Ukraine end.
From a street-level perspective, a military parade no longer makes much sense to Kazakh citizens. “Military parades are an archaism that evokes nothing but irony. Why show the world your military armor and rattle your weapons?” public figure Murat Telibekov said in an interview with the Karavan newspaper. “The war in Ukraine showed what the second army of the world actually turned out to be.”
This year, there is also a powerful economic reason for the cancellation of commemorative events: it would be bad optics for the government to splurge on a military extravagance at a time when the country is pressed to clean up after the worst flooding in 80 years destroyed homes and infrastructure, killing livestock and displacing thousands.
