“In the West, the elite have gone mad,” Putin said

Expectations were high, especially after US President Biden’s lightning visit to Kiev on Monday. But initially Vladimir Putin said little new in his speech to the nation on Tuesday. In fact, from the one hour and fifty minutes in which, in the large conference hall of the Moscow business center Gostinnyj Dvor, he met both chambers of the Russian parliament, the government, the governors of the regions, the members of the Academy of Sciences, the business and military leaders, and addressing a handful of cultural leaders, nearly two-thirds were devoted to economic promises.

But when he was almost at the end of his speech, the blow still followed: Putin canceled Russia’s cooperation in the new START treaty with the US, which is intended to limit the number of long-range nuclear missiles.

According to him, that treaty could not be viewed separately from the war in Ukraine and “other hostile actions by the West against our country.” Then Putin announced that Russia had prepared its new strategic weapons systems – but that Russia would never deploy them first – and warned that nuclear tests could be resumed.

Until then, things were going smoothly, as if nothing much had happened at all. When Putin also said that the regional elections in September and next year’s presidential elections would be held entirely in accordance with the Russian constitution, it even seemed that his words were mainly intended for the interior.

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The good tsar

The war in Ukraine slumbered in the background of the future flourishing economic landscapes he sketched. For example, when Putin announced that all veterans of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine will have their own social worker, and that Western sanctions have had no effect whatsoever. Or that the Russians who had kept their money abroad and lived or worked there were second-class citizens. Entrepreneurs were better off investing their money in their own country, in industry, health care and the construction of good roads. In this way, Russia could become an autarky that was economically dependent on no other country. Putin therefore resembled the good tsar, who scattered his well-known promises to keep the people happy and his boyars to keep in line.

The bored faces of those boyars showed this time that they already knew those promises from their lord’s earlier speeches. They also knew very well that the roads in their country would never get well.

The increase in the minimum wage, the partial tax exemption for families with more than two children and the education reforms also failed to bring those present into a state of excitement. At most, the good news was that GDP had risen by 2.2 percent and that inflation, at 4 percent, was much lower than in the West, which wanted to make the Russian people suffer with its sanctions.

Historical changes

Most importantly for Putin, Russia had the right to be strong. That is also why, after speaking for 45 minutes, he quoted Prime Minister Stolypin (nicknamed ‘the noose’), who said the same thing at the beginning of the twentieth century. With those words he seemed to encourage his audience. As if he wanted to remind them that Russia and the Russians were going through historic changes, as he had said at the beginning of his speech.

It was not for nothing that he started with his usual tune, which he has been proclaiming with some variation since February 2022: that the West and Ukraine started this war, that the West was already training Ukrainian soldiers before Russia’s “special military operation” in the Donbas, that Russia was doing everything possible to reach a peaceful solution and that it was open to dialogue.

NATO expansion (“to our borders!”), the SDI anti-missile system in Eastern Europe and the Western refusal, at the end of 2021, to give security guarantees to Russia also came up in that argument. And of course he cited as the main reason for invading Ukraine that Kiev planned a major attack in Donbas in February 2022, and by extension in Crimea. Such an offensive had to be ahead of the Kremlin.

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That Putin ‘knows’ history was also apparent from the parallels he tried to draw with the 1930s. Then Western countries would have paved the way for Nazi Germany. The same thing happened in Ukraine, he said. And that was another policy that went back to the nineteenth century, when Austria-Hungary had seized parts of western Russia.

To emphasize the Nazi nature of the Zelensky government, the Russian president also referred to the Ukrainian battalion ‘Edelweiss’, which took its name from a German combat unit in World War II. According to him, the fact that the West allowed such Nazi sympathies was mainly due to the fact that it wants to use everything to crush Russia. In short, the West pursued the same ‘revanchist policy’ against Russia as in the 1930s, and Ukraine was a pawn in it.

Gender Neutral God

All in all, according to Putin, it was clear that “the Western elites” want to defeat Russia, but that Russia cannot be defeated. “We will respond appropriately, because it is about the survival of our country,” he said. To add that it was impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.

To further boost the morale of his audience, Putin then targeted Western societies for disrespecting their national identities, the traditional family, and the values ​​of the Holy Scriptures. Russian society had to be prevented from being destabilized by this Western degradation. That the Anglican Church would consider moving to a gender-neutral God could count on his scorn. “In the West, the elite have gone mad.”

After Putin thanked the Russian people for all the support they gave to the soldiers at the front in Ukraine, he concluded his speech with: “The truth is with us.” Then the national anthem sounded and everyone hurried to the reception hall, where champagne and caviar were waiting.