• Putin’s spokesman said the Victory Day aerial display was called off due to bad weather.
• However, weather forecasts over Moscow during the parade forecast sunny skies and wind at 5 mph.
• The “Z” formation was seen in television reports showing preparation for the May 9 parade.

Russia was expected to use its Victory Day celebrations to flex its aerial might, but a planned aerial demonstration over Moscow was called off suddenly on Monday, according to authorities, because of inclement weather.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, told local media outlet Kommersant that the aerial segment of the ceremony was canceled because of “bad weather.”

However, during Putin’s speech at just past 10 a.m. local time, an AccuWeather reading of the local weather in Russia showed “mostly sunny” weather in Moscow, with “excellent” air quality. The Accuweather forecast for the rest of the day indicated that it would be “mostly sunny,” with some clouds, and that wind speed was around 5 mph.

The May 9 Victory Parade, which marks the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany, was scaled down by around a third this year but was still expected to include an aerial show of planes pulling into a “Z” formation.

Tass, a state-owned Russian news agency, reported on May 4 that the aerial display was to feature 77 planes to represent the number of years since Moscow’s victory over Germany. Per Tass, the display included the Il-80, the “doomsday” plane that the Russians claim is nuke-proof, and other bomber jets.

Tass also detailed plans for eight MiG fighter jets to fly over the Red Square.

The white Z started out as a mysterious Russian military symbol and has now been co-opted by Russia’s military and nationalist groups within the country as a rallying symbol for victory.

The same display was seen in television reports as well.

During his Victory Day speech, Putin said the day was meant to mark the “triumph of our unified Soviet Union.”

“You are fighting for your motherland, for its future, so no one will forget the lessons of the Second World War,” Putin told the Russian soldiers gathered in Red Square.

As Putin called up anti-Nazi rhetoric on Victory Day, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Oleksandr Tkachenko said that Russia had bombed a Jewish cemetery in Hlukhiv, Sumy Oblast. Ukraine also said that Russia bombed the Holocaust memorial site Babyn Yar earlier this year.

Read the original article on Business Insider

So, let’s get this straight: The Russian President called off the air parade because of bad weather, but AccuWeather’s observation / forecast is supposed to be believed as correct and therefore, this means that Russian air forces are somehow incompetent because they did not fly on a day that had a good weather forecast.

This is the premise.

However, look at the photo that was included in the piece: How does that sky look?

Not “mostly sunny”. Let’s look at other scenes from the parade this year, just a couple… This one below is from The New York Times:

The article has plenty more, too. Lots of clouds, and vertical development on these clouds, which suggests strong updrafts and downdrafts. Not good for close formation flying. Not at all.

From The Scotsman:

And from me, myself and I, about an hour or so after the parade (Listen to the sounds as well as look at the skies)

I even mentioned the weather. It was windy, cool and unsettled. Later in the afternoon, there was sleet and rain and strong wind.

So, what do we have here?

Lies from Business Insider and Yahoo! News. That is what we have. plain and simple. I was HERE and can certainly verify it. I just did.

As it turns out, the weather was very clearly not suitable for miltary planes to execute low-altitude flyovers over any part of Moscow, let alone its Kremlin districts. Ask any pilot you know if they would want to execute low altitude flyovers of heavily populated areas in windy, unsettled conditions. This kind of weather is what pilots call “Marginal VFR” meaning Visual Flight rules apply, but that you had better be careful because that can change and end at any time, like if rain comes or snow comes, plus the turbulence that comes with unsettled weather.

Yahoo! News, through its rancid bias, simply picked up Business Insider’s equally poorly-informed news on the event and tried to spin up a “Russia sucks!” story over reality’s noncompliance with a weather forecast.

So, what is really going on here?

This is plain and simple propaganda. The implication of this piece, right down to its overly long and rambling title, is to try to spin the point that Russians are a bunch of rubes and they cannot keep their planes in the air, let alone do a parade under clear and fair conditions, therefore, they must be losing their asses in Ukraine, and they are just disgusting people anyway who need to be wiped off the face of the earth and thank God that the Ukrainians are commited to doing this, right down to the last Ukrainian.

Right?

But it was not true. Not one bit.

During the parade, I was in a building about one or two miles from Red Square. I was actually giving an English lesson to my student, a Russian professor of Literature who specializes in poetry. The professor is no fan of the war; when it started, I was asked that we not discuss it because it was too upsetting to see this going on. But we were both watching the TV in the cafe at the fitness center we met in (one meets in odd places for this kind of work!) and it was evident that the military parade came and went pretty quickly. We saw video of the missile trucks going by near the Sukharaevskaya Metro station, and we would have almost certainly been in the flight path of any flyovers. But nothing happened, and as I was watching the veils of snow and rain flowing from some particularly thick crowds, I opined that the air parade must have been canceled.

A later meeting with another student who lives outside Moscow confirmed this. She was near one of the airbases or airports and she told me that a plane took off early in the morning to check weather conditions before the parade. She saw it, saw the weather as it was and figured there would be no parade – the conditions were too rough.

So, now, dear Reader, here is the crux of this piece:

Whom does one believe?

I live in Moscow. I have been here for many years. While I certainly do support Russia in this conflict (my thinking is that they had better win because losing is going to bring all kinds of hell to this country) I also love the Ukrainian people in general and in particular many friends I have from there. I have no ill feelings towards them. I feel sorry for them because I think the United States especially, as well as NATO and the “power brokers” in the world, are just using the hell out of these poor people to fulfill some other ends that is totally without honor. That is my opinion, my bias, so, full disclosure, everyone!

Nevertheless, I hate propaganda. I think propaganda is the most dangerous aspect of this war. Here is why: Eventually the war will end and the two sides will need to begin to reconcile. It is bad enough that emotions and attitudes are going to be catastrophically hardened for decades because of this conflict. It is worse when either side says untruths about the other. There is a whole lot of that going on.

Now, I am also a realist – propaganda exists in every country, in every conflict and it is a fact of life in this fallen world. But that does not mean that I will let the propaganda that “supports my side” go while only taking exception with the other side. I am first and foremost a Christian. While I am a United States citizen and a permanent Russian Resident, I am actually a subject of the King of Kings. I will be asked if I stayed true when I meet him. And I really want to be able to answer “yes, I did the best I could.”

Yahoo! News and Business Insider were lying to all their readers. I just pointed it out and showed evidence that is personal and consistent. They were lying about this. I wonder, therefore, what else are they lying about?

Yet I also know that for those who don’t like certain sides, it will not matter what I presented here. They will go on insisting that the air parade was canceled because Russia just sucks and cannot keep it together. The Julia Davises and whoever else in the world that hates Russia will presume to tell you all that THEY are telling the truth. But they aren’t.

At least, they certainly did not do so here.

What will you believe?