Putin starts fourth and last term with no mention of successor
Russia’s tension with West still unresolved
VLADIMIR Putin will today be inaugurated for his fourth Kremlin term under the shadow of hugely strained ties with the West and a crackdown on the opposition, with Alexei Navalny and hundreds more detained at the weekend.
Opposition leader Navalny was arrested along with nearly 1 600 of his supporters on Saturday during nationwide rallies against Putin as police and paramilitary activists used force to break up demonstrations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Putin, who has ruled Russia for 18 years and used his last term to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launch a military campaign in Syria on the side of Bashar al-Assad the next year, has promised to improve living standards at home during his next Kremlin stint.
But he has remained silent on the issue of his succession – despite this being an inevitable concern as the constitution bars him from running again when his fourth term ends in 2024. Putin has struggled to revive an economy that crashed after Moscow was hit with Western sanctions over its annexation of Crimea in 2014, followed by a fall in global oil prices in 2016.
Despite this, his victory in the March election was never in question and the prospect of an inauguration in the Kremlin’s gilded Andreyevsky Hall has generated little excitement.
This year Putin’s minders are reportedly planning a fairly low-key inauguration ceremony that will not include a lavish Kremlin reception in an apparent effort to eschew any bad publicity.
In 2012, Putin’s black cortege raced through the deserted Moscow streets on its way to his third Kremlin inauguration, in what many saw as a major faux pas. This time Putin is only expected to meet volunteers who took part in his election campaign.
Political analysts said that Moscow’s attitude towards the West – which has only hardened over the crises in Ukraine and Syria, as well as accusations of spy poisoning in the UK and election meddling in the US – was also unlikely to change under Putin 4.0.
“For Putin any concession is a sign of weakness, so there shouldn’t be any expectation of a change in foreign policy,” said Konstantin Kalachev, the head of the Political Expert Group think tank in
Moscow.
But independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said the president’s approach to the international community would have to shift.
“Russia hasn’t been so isolated since the Soviet war in Afghanistan,” he said, referring to the 1979-1989 conflict. — AFP