Analysis | Russia’s Putin alert for signs of eroding Western unity on Ukraine
- Vladimir Putin, who has likened himself to Tsar Peter the Great, has used recent public appearances to articulate his raw imperial ambitions
- Western unity over the war in Ukraine faces an array of challenges, particularly the EU, in the face of disparate national interests
Vladimir Putin looked very much at ease. In a much-viewed video this month, the Russian president settled deep into his armchair, wearing an expression of bored nonchalance.
“Taking it back and strengthening it,” the 69-year-old Putin said, describing Peter’s 18th-century seizure of a strategic stretch of Baltic seacoast from Sweden. Now, he serenely told a group of Russian entrepreneurs, this duty “has also fallen to us”.
It might have been a deliberately over-the-top performance calculated to rattle Western allies at a particularly challenging juncture of the nearly four-month-old Ukraine war. Such stagecraft comes naturally to the one-time KGB operative, long-time Putin watchers say.
But some observers saw something more: a mask not so much torn off as casually discarded. In launching his full-scale invasion on February 24, Putin cited elaborate pretexts including an unfounded need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine; in the new video, he appeared to revert to an articulation of raw imperial ambition.
“The body language spoke volumes,” said Peter Dickinson, Ukraine editor for the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. “I think he really looked like a man with a weight off his shoulders – that he felt a sense of relief that the burden of maintaining these lies had been lifted”.