“We are defending our native home.” With these words, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly on Tuesday during his annual address to both houses of Parliament. This is an act similar to the State of the Nation address that is held in Western parliaments and that the head of the Kremlin delivers three days after the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, and also twenty-four hours after the visit of his American counterpart, Joe Biden, to Kiev.
Putin has spent much of his time criticizing Ukraine-supporting countries under the umbrella term of a “West” whose “goal is unlimited power.” In his opinion, his purpose is to turn the war that is shaking the former Soviet republic into a “global conflict” and for that he will not hesitate to “go to hell.” The head of the Kremlin has warned that the more weapons the United States and NATO allies provide to the Ukrainian Army, “the more we will have to fortify our borders” because, in his opinion, what is at stake now is the “existence of our country”. Putin has assured that he always wanted to resolve the conflict around Donbas “peacefully”, but in the face of open war he has no doubt that “we will use force to stop it.”
The speech has offered a couple of keys on what his strategy may be for the following months of confrontation. Russia “is invincible. You cannot beat Russia on the battlefield », he has asserted to show her conviction of victory and, therefore, her willingness to carry the confrontation to the end. To some extent, the president believes that the prolongation of the war and his current situation of virtual stalemate favors his strategy and the possibility that the allies exhaust themselves before him and reduce the export of arsenals to Kiev or redouble the pressure on the President Volodimir Zelensky to sit down to negotiate a peaceful solution.
Putin has also made it clear that he is expanding his invading purposes beyond Donbas by denouncing to legislators that “the purpose of the West is to take away from Russia the historical territories that today are called Ukraine.” A singular reading since his rival, Zelenski, has also made it clear that he is no longer satisfied just to save Donbas but to recover the Crimean peninsula, annexed to Russia in 2014. In short, the bitterness between the two countries has not diminished but rather which has grown on the eve of the first year of war.
The Russian president has made a long historical, or rather pseudo-historical, introduction on the origin of the current war and recalled all the antecedents that he has already listed in previous public interventions: from the Ukrainian harassment of the pro-Russian settlements to the “Nazi” indications of Your army. He accused the West of “being the symbol of a lie” for blaming Russia for the war, but assured that his country is prepared to “overcome step by step, carefully and continuously, the challenges it encounters.”
In this sense, the president has called on citizens and, directly, on businessmen to remain with the homeland after assuring that «Russia is an open country and an original civilization. Russia was handed down to us by our ancestors, but we need to preserve it and pass it on”, he added, resorting once again to his historical vision of the old empire.
Elections in 2024
His speech has also made reference to international sanctions against Russia. In this sense, he explained to the Assembly that the West has been “surprised by the country’s economic resistance and affirmed that Moscow” does not need to borrow abroad, bow down, beg for money, and then engage in a dialogue about how much to return. He has also said that the allies are wrong when they think that embargoes on oligarchs could jeopardize Russia’s political or economic stability. “None of the ordinary citizens have felt sorry for those who lost their capital in foreign banks, who lost their yachts and palaces,” he has said in a sharp critique of the “new elites” of the 1990s.
Putin welcomed the fact that private companies have “adapted” to the economy derived from the war, reported that unemployment has fallen to 3.4% in the country and announced an increase in the minimum wage. He has also guaranteed legislators that the presidential elections will be held in 2024.
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