Tanks rumbled across Kiev today as Ukraine marked 25 years of independence with a show of force against an increasingly assertive Russia and a war simmering in the pro-Kremlin separatist east.
Thousands of soldiers saluted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on the same square where a pro-EU revolution in 2014 ousted a Moscow-backed leader and left former master Russia fuming.
Poroshenko used the event to take a dig at Russian President Vladimir Putin for famous calling the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century".
"We were the ones who created what Putin later called the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe'," Poroshenko declared in a speech to the nation as hundreds of Ukrainian blue and yellow flags fluttered in the damp wind.
"Looking back at more than two years of war, we can confidently say that our enemy failed to achieve a single goal - it was not able to bring Ukraine to its knees."
More than 9,500 people have died and two million forced from their homes in fighting between government forces and pro-Russian militias in two major industrial regions in the east that rebels have partially controlled since April 2014.
Ukraine today reported the death of one soldier in what has recently turned into increasingly intense warfare.
Kiev also lost its strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea when it was seized by Russian soldiers on Putin's orders and annexed in March 2014.
Putin's actions plunged the Kremlin's relations with the West to a post-Cold War low that has complicated global attempts to find solutions to raging crises like the Syrian war.
But Russia has only ramped up its campaign to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and this month escalated tensions with Ukraine by accusing it of plotting an incursion into Crimea.
Putin has repeatedly denied involvement in the separatist conflict and described Russians captured or spotted in the war zone as off duty soldiers and volunteers who were "following the call of their heart".
But Kiev and the West accuse Russia of backing the insurgency in order to keep the Ukrainian leaders off balance and constantly dependent on the Kremlin's whims.
Both the United States and the European Union have imposed stiff economic sanctions on Kremlin-linked companies and members of Putin's inner circle that helped push Russia into an 18-month recession.
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