On 9 May, Russia and several former Soviet republics mark Victory Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945. In Moscow it remains a deeply emotional occasion. The city becomes a stage for parades and ceremony, with tanks, missile launchers and other hardware rolling through the streets in a carefully choreographed display of power and pride.

I made these photographs before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when this scene felt like a familiar ritual: tanks on the street, flags in the air, an awestruck crowd lining the route. The pixels in these frames have not changed, but the world around them has. Since then, millions have been displaced and so many lives have been lost. Cities that once felt distant and abstract from this parade are now daily names in reports of shelling and destruction.

This photo story turns away from the grandeur of the parade and towards the faces in the crowd. It looks for pride, nostalgia, curiosity and unease, and tries to place them in a wider social context. That gap between the moment an image is made and the moment it is viewed is where documentary work becomes powerful. Pictures are time capsules. They hold what we saw and, painfully, everything we did not yet know.

For me, that is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of images like this. The spectacle is brief. The human cost lasts for generations. Whatever flag is flying, it is almost always ordinary people who pay the price.