At the "Victory Day" parade, President Vladimir Putin took a seat in the front row in the gallery. To the left and right sat the war veterans.
According to long-time Russia observers, none of these men actually ever fought against Germany in World War II. The man on Putin's left is Gennady Zaitsev, born in 1934. "So he could not have participated in the war against Nazi Germany," Bild quoted the Moscow expert as saying from a tweet published after the 2023 parade.