PANDEMIC UPENDS Putin’s plans.

Election postponed,WWII victory celebration rethought

MOSCOW — A nationwide vote April 22 was supposed to finalize sweeping constitutional reforms that would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2036 if he wished.

But after the coronavirus spread in Russia, that plebiscite had to be postponed — an action so abrupt that billboards promoting it already had been erected in Moscow and other big cities.

Initially underestimated by Russian authorities, the pandemic has posed an unexpected challenge for Putin, whose political standing now depends on whether he can contain its damage.

On March 24, Putin was shown donning a yellow protective suit to visit a hospital for infected patients.

Officials then indefinitely postponed the vote on the constitutional reforms that would have allowed Putin to serve two more six-year terms after 2024. The amendments already have been approved by lawmakers, but the government wanted nationwide balloting to give the changes a democratic veneer. Campaigns promoting the vote had already kicked off in dozens of Russian regions.

Also under threat is a pomp-filled celebration of Victory Day on May 9, marking the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week no decision has been made on whether to postpone it, but authorities are considering such options as holding it without the veterans, a group especially vulnerable to the virus.

In preparation for the vote and Victory Day, Russia’s state news agency Tass had begun releasing parts of a three-hour interview with Putin, with the 67-year-old leader talking about what he had done for the country in the past 20 years and what more needs to be accomplished. But Tass suspended daily extracts of the interview, saying it was no longer relevant to an audience more concerned about the coronavirus.

By Monday, Russia’s total number of confirmed cases of covid-19 had reached 18,328, double the level of five days earlier. The number of deaths stood at 148, a number widely seen as an undercount amid reports of other causes of death being declared for people who were ill with covidlike symptoms.

For weeks, the coronavirus pandemic had the makings of a Kremlin propaganda coup; even as Western countries succumbed one by one, Russia appeared invincible, recording fewer than 100 new cases a day through late March despite its tightly packed cities, global travel connections and 2,600-mile land border with China.

There was talk that Putin’s early move to shut down most travel from China, along with an extensive testing and contact-tracing effort rooted in the Soviet Union’s disease-fighting legacy, was succeeding where Italy, Spain and the United States had failed. But it has become clear in recent days that Russia is unlikely to escape a severe hit by the pandemic, presenting an existential test to the country’s teetering health system and a new challenge to the aura of rising confidence and competence projected by Putin’s Kremlin.

“We have a lot of problems, and we don’t have much to brag about nor reason to, and we certainly can’t relax,” Putin told senior officials Monday in his bleakest comments on the crisis yet. “We are not past the peak of the epidemic, not even in Moscow.”

Putin warned of overworked medical staff and shortages of protective equipment, acknowledging what critics said was long clear: that Russia’s health system could be strained beyond its breaking point by the pandemic and that the government needed to do more.

The Kremlin’s response to the crisis has raised questions at home and abroad.

Domestically, Putin has been widely criticized for paying little attention to the epidemic at first, and then for distancing himself from it by delegating difficult decisions on lockdowns to regional governments and the Cabinet.

Some in the West have questioned the low number of official virus cases in Russia and dismissed its widely publicized effort to send planeloads of medical aid to Italy, the U.S., Serbia and other countries as a PR stunt.

Putin sought to reassure the nation in a TV address April 8, but part of his message comparing the coronavirus to invaders from the 10th and 11th centuries brought mockery on social media instead.

“Our country went through many serious challenges. It was tormented by the Pechenegs and the Cumans, and Russia got through all of it. We will defeat this coronavirus bug, too,” Putin said.

Social media users pointed out that not only did Putin use this line in 2010, he might have borrowed it from an anecdote from the 19th century. Information for this article was contributed by Daria Litvinova of The Associated Press and by Anton Troianovski of The New York Times.