 Putin is also wary of veterans who fought in the Second World War. The two military veterans seated next to President Vladimir Putin at Tuesday's Victory Day parade on Red Square did not fight in World War II. The against-vote investigative outlet reported Putin is traditionally flanked by World War II veterans on Victory Day, which celebrates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 with a massive military procession aimed at rallying patriotic fervor. This year, however, he was seated between former members of the Soviet secret police. Seated at Putin's right was former NKVD agent Yuri Devoikin, 98, who was deployed to Western Ukraine's Lviv region in 1944 to carry out operations to liquidate Ukrainian partisans. Devoikin had volunteered for the army in 1942 but never made it to the front. Against-Vote wrote, At Putin's left was former KGB officer Gennady Zaitsev, who was born in 1934, and helped put down the Prague Spring of 1968. Against-Vote reported, Zaitsev led the group of the seventh directorate of the KGB of the USSR in the Danube operation as the deployment in Czechoslovakia was called. Under his leadership, the Interior Ministry building in Prague was seized, against-Vote said.