Isolated Russia inaugurates Putin
President uses speech to ring in fifth term to cast religious sheen on his rule, Ukraine invasion
MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for a fifth term as president Tuesday in a ceremony filled with pageantry and a televised church service, as the Russian leader tried once more to depict his invasion of Ukraine as a religiously righteous mission that is part of “our 1,000-year history.”
Putin took the presidential oath — swearing to “respect and safeguard the rights and freedoms of man and citizen” — with his hand on a red-bound copy of Russia’s Constitution, the 1993 document that guarantees many of the democratic rights he has spent much of his 25-year rule rolling back.
Putin was reelected in March in a rubber-stamp contest Western nations dismissed as a sham. If he serves the full six years of his new term, he will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century.
“Together, we will be victorious!” Putin said at the end of a speech after he took the oath in the Kremlin’s gilded St. Andrew’s Hall.
The ceremony was replete with pomp: An honor guard marched ahead of Putin. Elaborate chandeliers hung overhead and supporters stood behind a velvet rope applauding as the Russian leader strode to the stage. Outside, a heavy snow fell, unusual in May, even for Moscow.
Putin offered no new policy details in his speech, even though analysts expect him to make some changes to the makeup of his government this week. He also said nothing about the tactical nuclear weapons drills his military announced Monday.
In a departure from the broadcasts of previous inaugurations, Russian state television dwelled at length on the church service blessing Putin.
“The head of state must sometimes make fateful and fearsome decisions,” Patriarch Kirill I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was shown telling Putin inside the Cathedral of the Annunciation on the Kremlin grounds. “And if such a decision is not made, the consequences can be extremely dangerous for the people and the state. But these decisions are almost always associated with victims.”
The scene underscored the Kremlin’s intensifying efforts to give a religious sheen to Putin’s rule and to cast his invasion of Ukraine as justified in Russia’s Christian tradition.
Ksenia Luchenko, an expert on Russian Orthodox Christianity at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the patriarch’s speech also appeared designed to hand Putin a religious carte blanche for any future violence.
“It looks like, ‘Do whatever you want, because we trust you completely,’ ” Luchenko said. “He’s trying to sacralize any decision” Putin makes, she added.