Putin aims to run Russia until 2036

Feels ‘personal responsibility’ for Russia

Vladimir Putin set the stage to stay on as Russia’s president for potentially another 16 years, reversing his past opposition to scrapping term limits so that he — and only he — can continue to rule the country.

“I fully recognize my own personal responsibility toward the citizens of this country,” Putin said Tuesday in an unscheduled speech before the lower house of parliament. “I see that people, certainly most of society, await my own views and decisions on the key question of governing the state, both today and after 2024” for a fifth and possibly sixth presidential term.

He spoke after a surprise appeal by ruling United Russia lawmakers for him to stay on as president once his current term ends in 2024. Their proposal to reset the term limit under a revised constitution, allowing Putin two more six-year terms, “may be possible but on one condition — that Russia’s Constitutional Court give an official ruling” that it wouldn’t contradict the country’s basic law, Putin said.

Putin, who’s been in power since 2000, is already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. For years, he rejected the notion of joining a long line of autocrats in amending the constitution to keep power, ranging from China’s Xi Jinping to central Asian leaders in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

His position appears to have shifted as alternative Kremlin proposals for keeping power that included a takeover of neighbouring Belarus and ruling through parliament or via Russia’s State Council — foundered. Advocates argue that constitutional changes announced by Putin in January and now passing through parliament mean he can simply disregard his current presidential terms under the new rules.

The Constitutional Court ruling — along with a national vote scheduled for April 22 in support of the plan that Putin also set as a condition — is all but certain to go the Kremlin’s way in Russia’s tightly-controlled political system. It opens the way for Putin, 67, to rule potentially to 2036, when he would be nearly 84.

Noting that the United States imposed presidential term limits only in 1951 — “that’s practically yesterday in historical terms” — Putin said Russia was still strengthening its political system after the turmoil that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

In such times, “stability is probably more important and should be the priority,” he said. Once the country has become stronger, rotation of leaders “takes priority,” he added.