Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to come to Moscow to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War on May 9, 2025, Russian Ambassador to China Igor Morgulov said. “In turn, [Xi Jinping] invited Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to China for the celebrations planned for early September,” the diplomat said on the Rossiya 24 TV channel, TASS reports.
This year, China will also celebrate the 80th anniversary of the victory over Japan and the end of World War II. Beijing has not yet officially confirmed Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow. The last time he attended the Victory Parade in Moscow was in 2015. In his New Year’s greetings to Putin, the Chinese leader promised to deepen cooperation with Russia in the year of the 80th anniversary of the victory in the “world anti-fascist war.”
Earlier, the Kremlin said that Russia had invited “a great many heads of state” to Moscow for May 9. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced their intention to attend the Victory Day parade. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, not a single foreign leader has come to Moscow to celebrate Victory Day. In 2023, Putin gathered seven heads of post-Soviet states in Moscow for May 9: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. They, with the exception of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, also attended the parade in 2024. They were then joined by Guinea-Bissau President Sisoku Embalo, Cuban President Michelle Diaz-Canel Bermudez, and Laos President Thongloun Sisoulith.