Belarus will send about 70 special operations troops to represent the country at Moscow’s Victory Day parade on May 9, 2025.
Alexander Lukashenko has also confirmed he’ll be attending the event. In an April 10 interview with Radik Batyrshin, head of the Mir international TV and radio company, Lukashenko spoke of a long-standing tradition of marking Victory Day in both countries.
“You have a tradition of celebrating Victory Day not only in Minsk but also on Red Square in Moscow. Can you tell us how that tradition came about?” the journalist asked.
“The tradition began — and I’ve said this many times — with my first official visit to Moscow. I started working with the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. … And it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin who really got this tradition going, inviting us to those parades many years ago. … Not showing up on Red Square — not because it was a shared victory, but because not being there to represent the heroic Belarusian people — would’ve just felt wrong. So it turned into a tradition that I always attend events in the Russian Federation,” Alexander Lukashenko said.
The WTF team checked whether Lukashenko really traveled to Moscow every year on May 9 during his time in office — and found no such tradition of celebrating Victory Day in both countries.
The first Victory Day parade in Moscow after the collapse of the USSR was held in 1995, marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. Leaders from 56 countries gathered on Red Square that day. We found no mention of Alexander Lukashenko attending the event. That same day, Minsk held its own Victory Day parade and a veterans’ march. The May 11, 1995, front page of Narodnaya Gazeta featured a photo of Alexander Lukashenko at the veterans’ march in Minsk.
Since then, Victory Day parades on Moscow’s Red Square have become an annual tradition. In 1996, Lukashenko made his first official visit to Moscow. It’s possible that’s the year he spent Victory Day on Red Square. There’s no clear proof to confirm or dispute that. But in the years that followed, he consistently spent May 9 in Minsk. Even milestone anniversaries, when the Kremlin invited foreign leaders to Moscow, were no exception. That pattern can be traced through event archives on the websites of the Belarusian and Russian presidents.
In 2005, 2010, and 2015, Lukashenko visited Moscow ahead of the holiday but returned to Minsk for May 9. In 2015, he explained it this way:
“I’ll be in Minsk on May 9 — we have our own Victory Day parade, just like in Moscow. It’s unacceptable for the commander in chief to be absent. No one else, under the Constitution, can take the salute.”
The exception was 2020, when Lukashenko celebrated May 9 in Minsk but also attended the parade in Moscow, which was held on June 24 due to the pandemic. Only in the past two years — 2023 and 2024 — did Alexander Lukashenko take part in the Red Square celebrations on the same date. Afterward, he returned to Minsk. Because of this, the festivities in the Belarusian capital were pushed to the evening.