PUTIN SHIFTS IMAGE FROM WARTIME CRISIS MODE
After a stressful start, Russian leader projects the aura of a calm, paternalistic leader.
Early in his war against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin of Russia appeared tense, angry and even disoriented. He spent days out of the public eye, threatened the West with nuclear strikes, and lashed out at anti-war Russians as “scum”. But last month, a new Mr Putin has emerged, very much resembling his pre-war image: relaxed, patient and self-confident.
Holding court with young people, he compared himself casually to Peter the Great, Russia’s first emperor. Addressing an economic conference, he dismissed the notion that sanctions could isolate Russia and crowed that they were harming the West even more. And on Wednesday, he strode, smiling, across a sun-baked airport tarmac in Turkmenistan, slinging off his suit jacket before ducking into his Russian-made armoured limousine to head for a five-country summit meeting.
It was Mr Putin’s first trip abroad since the invasion of Ukraine, and his first multiday foreign trip since the pandemic — an apparently calculated bit of counterprogramming to the Nato summit in Spain, where Western nations were announcing a new strategic vision, with Moscow as their primary adversary. Mr Putin also sent a message to Russians and to the world that despite the fighting in Ukraine, the Kremlin is settling back into a routine.
The trip was the latest step in a broader transformation of Mr Putin that has become apparent in recent weeks. He is telegraphing a shift away from wartime crisis mode back toward the aura of a calm, paternalistic leader shielding Russians from the dangers of the world.
It suggests that Mr Putin thinks that he has stabilised his war effort and his economic and political system, after Russia’s initial military failures and an avalanche of Western sanctions. “The initial shock has passed and things have turned out to be not all that bad,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr Putin, describing the president’s perspective.
Key to Mr Putin’s message this week is that Russia’s global isolation is far from total — and that the declarations at the Nato summit — a determination to back Ukraine and strengthen the alliance’s eastern flank — are of little concern.
Mr Putin’s trip to Central Asia was notable not just because it was the first time he had left the country since he began the invasion on Feb 24, but also because he has been taking extraordinary pandemic precautions.
After flying to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on Tuesday for a meeting with the country’s president, Emomali Rahmon, Mr Putin spent the night there — the first time he is known to have spent the night outside Russia since January 2020. On Wednesday, Mr Putin flew to Turkmenistan for a gathering of the leaders of the five countries surrounding the Caspian Sea, which also include Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Iran.
The summit held practical significance because Russia is trying to expand its influence in the economically vital, energy-rich region, while looking to fill the power vacuum left behind by the American withdrawal from nearby Afghanistan. But the summit was also of symbolic importance for Mr Putin’s audience back home, offering a split-screen image of diplomatic activity and Russian soft power just as Western leaders gathered in Madrid.
Mr Putin presented two handmade sabres and a chess set from the Urals to Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, the eccentric former leader of insular Turkmenistan who was celebrating his 65th birthday; at the gathering with Caspian leaders, Mr Putin called for more regional cooperation, including a Caspian
“After some very loud and shocking steps, he needs feedback .... It’s as though he’s going out into the light to see what he has actually done. FRANCE-BASED KREMLIN EXPERT, TATIANA STANOVAYA
film forum.
To Tatiana Stanovaya, an expert on the Kremlin, who is based in France, Mr Putin’s flurry of appearances is the latest iteration in his regular oscillation between periods of intense private and intense public activity. Mr Putin can be tight-lipped for weeks in high-pressure periods — as he was ahead of the winter invasion, when he went more than a month without speaking publicly about Ukraine. In the weeks after the invasion, he repeatedly went days without appearing on camera.
But in other cases, Mr Putin can embark on a flurry of, by Kremlin standards, freewheeling events — as he did this month when he spent more than 90 minutes in a town hall session with young entrepreneurs, and a week later, when he appeared for nearly four hours onstage at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. “After some very loud and shocking steps, he needs feedback,” Ms Stanovaya said of Mr Putin. “He starts to actively appear in public, he starts to open up, he starts to be more outspoken. It’s as though he’s going out into the light to see what he has actually done.”
Mr Putin did not mention Ukraine or his showdown with the West in his eight-minute speech in Turkmenistan on Wednesday, another sign of how he is projecting a return to business as usual.
Instead, he spoke of Russian efforts to improve transport and tourism in the region. The first Caspian cruise ship, he said, would sail next year from Russia’s Astrakhan region at the Volga River delta. The ship’s name: Peter the Great.