After President Biden known as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “crazy S.O.B.” this week, the Kremlin was quick to issue a stern condemnation.
However the picture of an unpredictable strongman able to escalate his battle with the West is one which Mr. Putin has absolutely embraced after two years of full-scale struggle.
At residence, the Kremlin is sustaining the thriller over the circumstances of the dying final week of Aleksei A. Navalny, stopping the opposition chief’s household from reclaiming his physique.
In Ukraine, Mr. Putin is urgent his military to take care of its brutal offensive, boasting on tv that he stayed up all evening as town of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces.
And in outer area, American officers warn, Russia could also be planning to place a nuclear weapon into orbit, aboard a satellite tv for pc, which might violate one of many final arm management treaties.
In energy since 1999, Mr. Putin, 71, is ready to increase his rule to 2030 in Russia’s rubber-stamp elections subsequent month. Because the vote nears, he’s feeding his more and more overt conception of himself as a history-making chief carrying on the legacy of previous rulers who have been prepared to sacrifice untold numbers of lives to construct a stronger Russian state.
However Mr. Putin additionally faces headwinds: a still-determined Ukrainian resistance, a Western alliance that largely stays united and murmurs of discontent within the Russian public. The query is whether or not Mr. Putin, as he exults in main a “thousand-year, eternal Russia,” can keep away from the home upheaval that has additionally been a repeated hallmark of the nation’s historical past.
“Putin is living in eternity,” stated Boris B. Nadezhdin, an antiwar politician who tried to mount a presidential bid to challenge Mr. Putin however was barred from the March poll. Itemizing rulers courting to the ninth century, he added of Mr. Putin: “It’s clear he’s thinking of himself alongside Oleg the Wise, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and perhaps Stalin.”
Mr. Nadezhdin, who has labored within the Russian authorities and served in Parliament, insisted in a video name interview this week that Mr. Putin’s grip on energy is weaker than meets the attention. The safety, stability and elevated prosperity that was lengthy Mr. Putin’s promoting level after the chaos of the Nineteen Nineties are all waning, Mr. Nadezhdin stated; “This regime,” he went on, “is historically doomed.”
Certainly, whilst Mr. Putin has labored onerous to color an image of Russia as an invincible state, he has repeatedly been caught off guard. There was the Kremlin’s gorgeous intelligence failure two years in the past, when Mr. Putin anticipated Russian troops to be welcomed as liberators and that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s authorities would rapidly collapse.
There was the 24-hour rebellion staged final summer season, when Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, lengthy considered as a detailed Putin ally, introduced Russia to the brink of civil struggle.
And, regardless of a crackdown on dissent that some analysts describe as extra fierce than the late-stage Soviet Union, Russians are nonetheless braving arrest to point out their disagreement.
A group of women has continued to stage small protests demanding that their mobilized sons and husbands be introduced residence; folks laid flowers in reminiscence of Mr. Navalny in scores of Russian cities; and Mr. Nadezhdin was capable of submit greater than 100,000 signatures final month in his bid to get on the presidential poll with an antiwar message.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Supreme Court docket upheld the federal election committee’s ruling to maintain Mr. Nadezhdin off the poll. It was an indication that Mr. Putin, although he has allowed liberal candidates to run towards him in previous elections as shows of pluralism, is taking no probabilities this time round.
As a substitute, the Kremlin seems centered on utilizing the presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17, as a pageant of public endorsement of Mr. Putin’s rule — and his invasion.
Subsequent Thursday, Mr. Putin will set the stage along with his annual state of the nation speech, a televised occasion that options the president presiding over a whole lot of prime officers displaying their allegiance to their chief.
Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor who’s near the Kremlin, stated with the ability to current a landslide electoral victory as proof of public help for the struggle seemed to be Mr. Putin’s predominant objective for the March election.
“The elections — and Vladimir Putin’s high result in these elections — are meant to electorally legitimize Putin’s policies, including the S.V.O.,” Mr. Remchukov stated in a cellphone interview, utilizing the Russian initials for “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s time period for the struggle. “If he gets, say, 75 to 80 percent of the vote, then this will mean that the people are giving him their approval for this policy.”
Portraying the invasion as having broad public help can be permitting the Kremlin to justify its crackdown on dissent.
Footage of masked safety service provides detaining critics of the struggle has turn out to be commonplace on Russian tv. On Tuesday, Russia’s home safety service, referred to as the F.S.B., introduced it had arrested a visiting 33-year-old Russian American girl on suspicion of treason.
Her alleged crime: donating about $50 to a Ukrainian charity. She faces 20 years in jail.
Information of that arrest got here simply 4 days after the dying of Mr. Navalny, who spent greater than three years in jail, together with some 300 days in solitary “punishment” cells. How Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic jail referred to as Polar Wolf stays unknown; his spokeswoman stated on Thursday that the authorities stated he died of pure causes.
On Thursday, Mr. Navalny’s mom said the authorities were “blackmailing” her into agreeing to a “secret funeral” for her son.
“With Navalny’s death, the Russian regime has surpassed the late Soviet one in its cruelty and cynicism,” Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Middle, wrote. He argued that Mr. Putin’s rule has gone from “a dictatorship of deceit to a dictatorship of fear, and after the outbreak of war to an outright dictatorship of terror.”
However Mr. Putin, in public, is protecting his distance from the equipment of repression that he oversees. Whereas a spokesman stated the president had been briefed on Mr. Navalny’s dying, Mr. Putin himself has not commented on it.
As a substitute, Mr. Putin revealed this week that he was up late the evening after Mr. Navalny died consumed by one thing else: the struggle in Ukraine.
In a televised assembly along with his protection minister, Sergei Okay. Shoigu, Mr. Putin described being briefed in actual time on Russia’s advance in Avdiivka till 4 a.m. final Saturday morning. At 11 a.m., Mr. Shoigu and Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the top of Russia’s basic workers, returned to temporary the Russian chief once more on Ukraine’s rushed withdrawal from the strategically necessary metropolis, Mr. Putin stated.
Mr. Shoigu stated the army had carried out the president’s order to arrange loudspeakers on the southern Ukrainian entrance to coax troopers into surrendering. The message was geared towards exhibiting Mr. Putin as a tireless chief, in tune with all the small print of the struggle.
Within the assembly, Mr. Putin dismissed White Home considerations about potential Russian plans to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit this yr. As a substitute, he stated, it was Russia’s new technology of nuclear weapons meant for earthbound targets that “they really should be afraid of.”
On Thursday, Mr. Putin took an additional step to remind the world of Russia’s arsenal, taking a 30-minute flight in a nuclear-capable bomber. However hours later, requested about Mr. Biden’s “crazy S.O.B.” feedback that the Kremlin’s spokesman had condemned earlier, Mr. Putin turned playful — a reminder of the previous Okay.G.B. agent’s fixation on sowing confusion.
Utilizing a nickname for Vladimir, Mr. Putin stated of Mr. Biden: “He cannot say: ‘Volodya, good boy.’”
