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

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Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:04pm, 21 Jun 2022Updated: 1:08pm, 21 Jun 2022

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.

In a matter-of-fact tone, he likened himself to a modern-day Peter the Great, the empire-building Russian tsar, and suggested that the conquest of a sovereign neighbour’s territory was not only justifiable, but laudable.

“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”.