Confident Putin declares ‘victory will be ours’ in Ukraine

Mr Putin spoke from a position of relative strength. Russian forces fended off Ukraine’s counteroffensive this year and are now attacking in several areas along the front line. Military production in Russia is ramping up, and Western sanctions have failed to cripple the economy.

At the same time, Ukraine faces some of the steepest challenges of the war, deadlocked on the battlefield and urgently seeking to shore up Western support.

Just this week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky came away from Washington empty-handed as he sought to persuade Congress to pass a substantive aid package.

EU agrees membership talks

Ukraine did receive a glimmer of good news on Thursday when the European Union agreed to officially open talks for Ukraine to join the bloc. However, the EU failed to agree on a €50 billion ($82 billion) package in financial aid that Ukraine desperately needs to stay afloat.

Accession to the EU could take years, but any attempt by Ukraine to move closer to the West has always irritated Mr Putin, including a potential trade deal that Russia pressured Ukraine to abandon in 2013.

“History is made by those who don’t get tired of fighting for freedom,” Mr Zelensky told a summit of the EU’s 27 leaders in Brussels.

Mr Putin spoke at a nationally televised event near the Kremlin that featured two staples of the two-plus decades of his rule: his year-end news conference, at which hundreds of journalists try to get the president’s attention by yelling and holding up signs; and his annual call-in show, in which thousands of regular Russians write in, many trying to get him to intervene to solve local problems.

Last year, Mr Putin held neither event, a sign that he had little good news to report after the disastrous beginning of his invasion of Ukraine.

This year, the Kremlin for the first time combined the two so that Thursday’s spectacle became a head-spinning telecast that alternated between questions from journalists in the hall and carefully selected notes and videos sent in by the public.

Throughout the event, Mr Putin sought to appear confident and in command. Next year’s rubber-stamp presidential election, which is expected to grant him another six-year term, went largely unmentioned, suggesting that he saw no need for even perfunctory campaigning.

Queried about problems, Mr Putin largely brushed them off, even when it came to the skyrocketing price of eggs. He responded to a question about it with a deadpan, off-colour joke before apologising for his government’s inability to come to grips with the problem.

And when a military correspondent asked about the shortage of drones on the front line, Mr Putin shot back, “You can’t not see that it’s getting better.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, wrote: “Putin isn’t interested in currying favour or buttering people up. He believes that the people are with him, and therefore he allows himself to behave very reservedly.”

The event’s stagecraft highlighted the war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin still describes as “the special military operation”. The first 90 minutes featured a wounded soldier, two military bloggers and three video questions from Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia.

Unlike the war’s early months, when Russian officials sought to hide its reality from the public, the Kremlin now evidently sees it as a winning message.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

AP