Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Immortal Regiment is a mass civil march held each year on the 9th of May during Victory Day celebrations. Participants carry photographs of relatives who served in the Soviet Armed Forces, on the home front, or in resistance organizations during the Second World War. It is also a public non-profit organization created in Russia on a voluntary basis.
The Immortal Regiment was founded by three journalists: Sergey Lapenkov, Sergey Kolotovkin, and Igor Dmitriev. They launched the march in Tomsk on the 9th of May 2012, after noticing that fewer and fewer veterans were surviving to march on Victory Day themselves.
The Immortal Regiment marched on Red Square for the first time on the 9th of May 2015, immediately after the Moscow Victory Day Parade marking the 70th anniversary of victory. More than 50 thousand people took part, including President Vladimir Putin, who carried a portrait of his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin.
By 2016, Immortal Regiment marches were being held in 42 countries. The movement had already spread to 1,150 settlements across 17 countries by 2015. Marches have been conducted in cities including Washington D.C., Berlin, Tashkent, and Yekaterinburg.
In 2023, the march was cancelled under the stated pretext of security concerns, with observers suggesting the government feared participants might carry portraits of those killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war. In 2024, Sergey Aksyonov, Head of the Republic of Crimea, announced the Crimean cancellation on the 19th of April, and Elena Tsunaeva of the movement's organizational committee confirmed the Russia-wide cancellation four days later.
Critics, including Igor Dmitriev, one of the movement's own founders, have argued that the procession has shifted from honoring the war dead to serving government domestic and foreign policy interests. A separate criticism holds that many participants carry photographs they have no personal connection to and discard them after the event.