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A belligerent Kremlin flew eight fighter jets over Moscow in a “Z” formation symbolizing its continuing attack on Ukraine Saturday, part of a dress rehearsal for Russia’s annual Victory Day parade.

Vladimir Putin is expected to use Monday’s holiday, which commemorates the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany, to portray his invasion of Ukraine as a 21st century fight against fascism – and to claim victory over the port city of Mariupol.

Putin has accused President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government of neo-Nazi links, despite strenuous denials from Kyiv and its Western allies.

The parade, featuring some 11,000 troops, will include myriad military units and a display of nuclear weapons – just one-third of its usual size, The Sun reported, because so many fighters and so much materiel remain bogged down in Ukraine.

“These symbolic dates are to the Russian aggressor like red to a bull,” said Ukraine’s first deputy interior minister, Yevhen Yenin. “While the entire civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars on these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and is preparing to dance over bones in Mariupol.”

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry taunted Russia with a video showing the destruction of a Russian Navy landing craft.

“The traditional parade of the Russian Black Sea fleet on May 9 this year will be held near Snake Island – at the bottom of the sea,” the defense ministry tweeted. Satellite photos analyzed by the AP showed thick black smoke rising off Snake Island, about 20 miles off the coast of Ukraine, where both sides reported air and sea combat operations.

Meanwhile Saturday, a Russian air strike on the village of Bilohorivka, in the eastern region of Luhansk, destroyed a school where 90 civilians had been taking shelter.

“About 30 people have already been rescued from the rubble,” Serhiy Hayday, leader of the Luhansk regional military administration, posted on Twitter. “The rescue operation continues.”

And in shattered Mariupol, “all women, children and elderly people” were finally evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said – but up to 2,000 fighters remained in the sprawling seaside complex.

The Russia-aligned Donetsk People’s Republic said it had saved 152 people, including 32 children, from elsewhere in the flattened city.

Zelensky said his government was “working on diplomatic options to save our military who still remain at Azovstal.”

“Influential mediators are involved,” he added.

Donbass Today, which claims to cover events on both sides, tweeted that a group of Ukrainian soldiers had left the plant carrying white flags of surrender, a report that was not verified by any international media.

Securing the strategically important Sea of Azov port would give Moscow a land bridge to the Crimea Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine during a 2014 invasion.

Zelensky said in his nightly address that the “extraordinary strength of the Ukrainian position” lies in all the countries of the free world understanding what is at stake in the ruinous war.

“We are defending ourselves against an onslaught of tyranny that wants to destroy everything that freedom gives to people and states,” the Ukrainian leader said. “And such a struggle, for freedom and against tyranny, is fully comprehensible for any society, in any corner of the globe.”