Mariupol - President Vladimir Putin is set to send a "doomsday" warning to the West on Monday while marking the 77th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany, displaying Russia's vast firepower while its forces fight on in Ukraine.

While Russia continues to wrack Ukriane’s coast on Saturday as Russian forces fired cruise missiles at the city of Odesa and bombarded a steel mill housing Ukrainian civilians and fighters.

Remaining defiant in the face of Western isolation, Putin will speak on Red Square before a parade of troops, tanks, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

A fly-past over St Basil's Cathedral will include supersonic fighters, Tu-160 strategic bombers and, for the first time since 2010, the Il-80 "doomsday" command plane, which would carry Russia's top brass in the event of a nuclear war, the Defence Ministry said.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, more than any other country, and Putin has railed in recent years at what Moscow sees as attempts in the West to revise the history of the war to belittle the Soviet victory.

Beside the 1812 defeat of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the defeat of Nazi Germany is the Russians' most revered military triumph, though both catastrophic invasions from the west left Russia deeply sensitive about its borders.

The war in Ukraine, which has killed thousands of people and displaced nearly 10 million will cast a long shadow over this Victory Day.

In a sign of the unexpectedly effective defense that has sustained the fighting into its 11th week, Ukraine’s military flattened Russian positions on a Black Sea island that was captured in the war’s first days and has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

As Russia’s Monday holiday commemorating Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II approached, cities across Ukraine prepared for an expected increase in Russian attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged residents numbed by more than 10 weeks of war to heed air raid warnings.
-AP/Reuters