President Vladimir Putin was hailed a ‘tsar’ on his 72nd birthday on Monday by some supporters who said the former KGB spy had raised Russia up from its knees and would deliver victory against the West in the Ukraine war.
Putin, who took the Kremlin’s top job just eight years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, is the longest serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin who died at his dacha outside Moscow in 1953 aged 74.
Cast by Western leaders as an autocrat, killer and war criminal, Putin has seen his popularity rise inside Russia since he ordered thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, according to Russian opinion polls.
“God save the Tsar!,” wrote ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, who has long advocated the unification of Russian-speaking and other territories in a vast new Russian empire which he says must include Ukraine.
“Putin rules the country confidently and unhurriedly. And it shall always be so – well, almost,” Dugin added in his birthday greeting, posted on his Telegram messaging channel minutes after midnight.
Unlike most of Russia’s historical leaders, Putin has no visible successor. He also has no serious rivals, according to multiple Russian sources.
He is now locked into what Russian officials say is the gravest confrontation with the West – whose combined economies are at least 20 times bigger than Russia’s – since the depths of the Cold War.
Opponents say early setbacks in the invasion illustrated Russia’s weakness, though US generals say Moscow quickly learned from its failures and has adapted to the demands of the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.
Russia, like Ukraine, has suffered huge losses of men in the war, and in 2023, Putin faced a failed mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner group. Prigozhin’s plane crashed two months to the day since the mutiny.
WAR LEADER
Putin, born in Leningrad just seven years after World War Two, has promised Russians victory in the Ukraine war, which he casts as a proxy conflict between holy Russia and an arrogant West which he says humiliated Russia as the Soviet Union crumbled.
As the West stepped up its support for Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars in pledged aid, Putin doubled down on his bet on war and used the West’s reaction to depict the conflict as an existential battle for Russia’s future.
According to a report published on Monday by Moscow-based Minchenko Consulting, Russians are increasingly seeing Putin as a figure who has managed to transform the global order, to their benefit.
“In domestic politics, Vladimir Putin every year acquires completely new features of the archetypal image of the Creator, who creates a new world order in which Russia will have a completely new role,” Minchenko Consulting said.
Western leaders have repeatedly said that Putin cannot be allowed to win the war, and that if he does, the West’s enemies will be emboldened and Putin might try attacking a NATO member, an assertion that Putin has repeatedly dismissed.
Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine and Putin has hiked defence spending to Cold War levels.
Currently, Russia controls a little under one fifth of Ukraine – including Crimea which it annexed in 2014, about 80% of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, about 71% of the Kherson region and 72% of Zaporizhzhia region.
Opponents have either left Russia, died or are silent. Russia’s opposition, almost all abroad, are divided and have failed to find a new leader since the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in February.
Navalny described Putin’s Russia as a brittle criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who care only about money. He had long forecast Russia could face seismic political turmoil, including revolution.
“With Putin, we shall be victorious,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, said on Monday. “A strong president is a strong Russia.”
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Reuters)
