Putin ditches year-end news event amid military setbacks

President Vladimir Putin has ditched his annual marathon news conference following a series of battlefield setbacks in Ukraine — a tacit acknowledgment that the Russian leader’s war has gone badly wrong.

Putin typically uses the year-end ritual to answer questions on domestic and foreign policy to demonstrate his grip on details and give the semblance of openness even though the event is tightly stage-managed.

But this year, with his troops on the back foot in Ukraine, it could be impossible to avoid uncomfortable questions about the Russian military’s blunders.

“Kremlin officials are almost certainly extremely sensitive about the possibility that any event attended by Putin could be hijacked by unsanctioned discussion about the ‘special military operation,’ ” the U.K. Defense Ministry wrote on Twitter, using Moscow’s term for the war.

Some of his previous performances lasted for more than 4 ½ hours, during which he has sometimes faced some pointed questions, but used them to mock the West or denigrate his domestic opponents.

Putin also has canceled another annual event this year, a televised call-in show in which he takes questions from the public to nurture his father-of-the-nation image.

And he has so far failed to deliver the annual televised state-of-the-nation address to parliament — a constitutional obligation. No date has been set for Putin’s address.

The Kremlin has muzzled any criticism of its invasion of Ukraine from the liberal anti-war camp, shutting independent media outlets and criminalizing the spread of any information that differs from the official view, including calling the campaign a war. But it has faced an increasingly vocal criticism from Russian hardliners, who have denounced the president as weak and indecisive and called for ramping up strikes on Ukraine.

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov said in a video commentary that the decision not to hold the news conference was likely because Putin “has nothing to say from the point of view of strategy.”

Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, claiming Moscow was forced to “demilitarize” the country in the face of NATO’s refusal to offer Russia guarantees that Ukraine wouldn’t be invited to join the alliance. Ukraine and much of the world denounced the Russian attack as an unprovoked act of aggression.

Putin and his officials hoped to quickly rout Ukraine’s military, but a fierce Ukrainian resistance — bolstered by Western weapons — derailed those plans. After a botched attempt to capture the Ukrainian capital, the Russian troops pulled back from areas around Kyiv in March.

A mobilization of 300,000 reservists that Putin ordered in September has failed to reverse battlefield fortunes for Russia. The mobilization order has prompted hundreds of thousands of Russians to flee abroad to avoid recruitment.

MIKHAIL METZEL/SPUTNIK Russian President Vladimir Putin, seen during a videoconference Tuesday, will not participate in some traditional and obligatory end-of-year assessments.