For the first time in 18 years, Russia’s Victory Day parade will have no tanks. There will be no missile carriers and no armoured columns on Red Square. Several regions have cancelled their parades altogether. Muscovites had been told to expect no mobile internet on the day itself or this evening. The Ministry of Defence has declared a unilateral ceasefire for 8 and 9 May and warned, in the same breath, that any Ukrainian attack will be answered by ‘a massive retaliatory missile strike on the centre of Kyiv’. The Russian Foreign Ministry has helpfully advised foreign embassies in the Ukrainian capital to consider evacuating their staff.

The official explanation for the missing weaponry is the threat from Ukrainian FPV drones. That threat is real, and it is itself a humiliation: the centre of the Russian capital can no longer be defended against a few thousand dollars’ worth of plywood and electronics. But the parade is not the cause of anything. It is a symptom of a quieter rearrangement inside the regime, in which power is shifting away from the technocrats who run the economy and towards the men who run Putin’s bodyguard.

The English-language shorthand ‘siloviki’ is too broad to be useful here. The winning faction is narrower: the FSB (Russia’s domestic intelligence and security agency) and the FSO (the country’s federal protective service) – Putin’s praetorian guard. Their footprint has expanded faster in the past year than at any point since the early 2000s.

This year, the FSB has been given back its........

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