Prepare for a long war, Putin’s message to Russians

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 100-minute state-of-the-nation speech sounded that war is the new normal.

Putin’s only major revelation was that Russia would suspend participation in New START, its last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the United States — and one that the State Department had already declared Russia to be not compliant with.

Putin’s main underlying message was that Russians, and implicitly the Western coalition that opposes him, must prepare for the war to last for years.

Noting that the invasion — which he continued to call a “special military operation” — began one year ago, Putin said in the address to governors and lawmakers gathered in Moscow: “We will solve the tasks before us step by step, carefully and consistently.” Claiming that the West was trying to “shift a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation,” he pledged that “we will respond accordingly.”

Putin’s words indicated that Russia was prepared to intensify the fighting, but they sounded far less ominous than the barely veiled threats he made several times last year about the potential use of nuclear weapons. Putin’s tone and diction, too, sounded far more measured than that of his last major speech to the nation, in September, when he announced a military draft.

“Everything is changing now, changing very fast,” Putin said Tuesday, referring to the consequences of war and of sanctions. “This is a time of not just challenges, but of opportunities.”

The rosy picture presented by Putin drew plenty of applause from the ruling elites — regional officials, lawmakers, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church — gathered in a hall across Red Square from the Kremlin. It ignored Russia’s repeated setbacks at the front and its bloody, slow-moving efforts to eke out territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.

Kirill Rogov, a Russian political analyst, said on social media after Putin’s remarks, “The main point of the address, as I saw it, was normalization.”