The U.S. has not confirmed Rubio’s attendance, but the parade is Russia’s May 9th annual military victory parade commemorating the end of WWII.

Meanwhile, Kyiv is asking EU officials to visit on May 9th as a show of diplomatic force against Putin. Separately, Zelenskyy is meeting with members of the coalition of the willing to determine security guarantees for Ukraine.

If Rubio attends Putin’s parade, it would seem to be a show of diplomatic support for Putin against Ukraine and the E.U.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush and then French President Jacques Chirac attended the parade on Moscow’s Red Square in 2005 but no Western leaders have attended in recent years.

Interesting thing to note about all this, there is a “fictionalized” Russian novel that is famous among far right Russian nationalists which Putin has called his favorite book, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be.

The book was written by a Putin loyalist and preemptively described the strategy to invade Ukraine years before it actually began.

The 2006 novel imagines Russia as a 3rd Rome, eventually conquering the entire globe. In the novel, Russia drops a nuclear bomb on the U.S. after conquering Europe. The U.S. surrenders to Russia, and a victory parade is held on May 9th in Red Square

representatives of the American elite: President [George] Bush III and former presidents Bill Clinton, Bush Junior, and Hillary Clinton; current and former members of the cabinet, the House, and the Senate; bankers and industrialists; newspaper commentators and television anchors; famous attorneys and top models; pop singers and Hollywood actresses. All of them passed through Red Square in shackles and with nameplates around their necks. … The Russian government was letting its own citizens and the whole world know that Russia had fought with and vanquished not only the American army but the American civilization.

So yeah, Rubio attending this year’s parade would make a bit of a statement.