Men sitting by Putin in Victory Day parade were reportedly former NKVD and KGB officers, not WWII veterans

The veterans who sat next to Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Victory Day parade in Red Square on Tuesday did not fight in World War II but served in the Soviet Union’s security agencies, the independent outlet Agentstvo has reported.

According to journalists, the man sitting to Putin’s right was 98-year-old Yury Dvoikin, who enlisted in the army as a volunteer in 1942 but was never sent to the front. In 1944, after finishing sniper school, Dvoikin was sent to the Lviv region as an NKVD agent to “carry out operations to liquidate the nationalist underground on the territory of western Ukraine.”

The man to the president’s left was reportedly 88-year-old Gennady Zaitsev, who was conscripted into the army in 1953. After six years of service, he began serving in the KGB. In 1968, Zaitsev took part in deployment of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia to put an end to anti-Soviet protests there. It was under his command that Soviet forces took over the Interior Ministry building in Prague. In the 1970s, Zaitsev headed the KGB’s Alpha counter-terrorism unit.