As Putin pitches his vision, voters avert their gaze from the war

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin’s vision of Russia — successful, innovative, and borderless — is on display at one of Moscow’s biggest tourist attractions, a Josef Stalin-era exhibition center that currently houses a sleek showcase called Russia 2024. The exhibit promotes what the Kremlin portrays as Russia’s achievements in the past two decades, roughly the period Putin has been in power, and his promises for the future after he secures another six-year term in rubberstamp elections this weekend.

The exhibition is in many ways a microcosm of a country whose people largely — at least in public — avert their gaze from the big and bloody war in Ukraine that Putin started more than two years ago.

The centerpiece is a grand hall housing pavilions featuring all the Russian regions, including five illegally annexed from Ukraine. Visitors to one pavilion are greeted by two LED screens displaying tulip fields that portray the region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, as calm and peaceful.

That is increasingly at odds with the reality of regular air raid sirens and deadly Ukrainian missile and drone strikes on the city, including one Thursday that killed two people and injured 19.

At the Crimea pavilion, throngs of visitors pose with men dressed as Roman legionnaires next to a video boasting about the bridge connecting the peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to the Russian mainland. There is no mention of the Ukrainian attack in 2022 that blew a hole in the bridge, or the frequent threats that lead to the closing of the bridge for hours at a time.

It is a cognitive dissonance many Russians have adopted, celebrating the motherland and accepting the government’s triumphal narrative — even as Putin has become a pariah in much of the Western world, domestic prices rise, and the Russian army suffers a staggering number of casualties in Ukraine.

“People have spent these two years in this weird state where you basically have to choose to ignore a major tragedy,” said Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist and research scholar at Princeton University. “Most people understand what is going on but they still have to pretend nothing is happening. This is a deeply traumatic experience.”

Neither the war nor the recently annexed Ukrainian territories were mentioned by expo visitors approached by a New York Times journalist on a recent visit.

Putin, 71, has visited the exhibition four times, and his presence is everywhere in quotations displayed in many pavilions.

“The borders of Russia don’t end anywhere,” read one quote at the exhibit for the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine. On a recent afternoon, a woman posed in front of the quote, flexing her biceps as a man photographed her.

With the Russian election apparatus controlled by the Kremlin, Putin is assured of being declared the landslide victor over three other candidates in voting that began Friday and ends Sunday night. Already in power since 1999, if he serves his term to completion, Putin will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 1700s.

The vote comes as Russians are winning on the battlefield amid waning support for Ukraine in the United States. Putin has of late adopted a tone of confidence, reassuring Russians that life will be normal while taking an increasingly antagonistic posture toward the West.