Early in his war against Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared tense, angry, and even disoriented. He spent days outside the public eye, threatening the West with nuclear attacks and denouncing the Russians as “foam” against the war.
But in June, a new Putin emerged, who looked very much like his pre-war image: relaxed, patient, and confident.
In court with young people, he casually compared himself to Peter the Great, Russia’s first emperor. Addressing an economy, he rejected the idea that sanctions conference could isolate Russia and said they were harming the West even more. And on Wednesday, he walked smiling across a sun-baked airport tarmac in Turkmenistan, taking off his suit jacket before diving into his Russian-made armored limousine to go to a five-country summit.
It was mr. Putin’s first trip abroad since the invasion of Ukraine, and his first multi-day trip abroad since the pandemic – a seemingly calculated bit of counter-programming to the NATO summit in Spain, where Western nations were developing a new strategic vision to announce, with Moscow as their primary opponent. Mr. Putin also sent a message to Russians and to the world that despite the fighting in Ukraine, the Kremlin is once again establishing itself in a routine.
The journey was the latest step in a broader transformation of Mr. Putin who has become clear in recent weeks. He telegraphs a shift away from wartime crisis mode back to the aura of a calm, paternalistic leader who protects Russians from the dangers of the world. This indicates that Mr. Putin thinks he has stabilized his war effort and his economic and political system, following Russia’s initial military failures and an avalanche of Western sanctions.
“The initial shock is over and things have not turned out so badly,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr. Putin, said and described the president’s perspective.
But the change in mr. Putin also illustrates that he is returning to his old instincts in an attempt to reflect on the risks that still lie ahead: a Ukraine that shows no sign of giving up the fight; an extraordinarily united and expanding NATO; and a fragile tranquility on the home front where the effects of sanctions and the ripple effects of the war’s death and destruction continue to play out.
“He understands that his legitimacy is based on being strong and active, on acting and winning,” he said. Gallyamov, now a political consultant living in Israel, continued. “Paralysis and absence from the public is like death to him. So he mastered himself and is trying to do it now. ”
The key to mr. Putin’s message this week is that Russia’s global isolation is far from total – and that the declarations at the NATO summit – a determination to support Ukraine and strengthen the alliance’s eastern flank – are of little concern.
Better understand the Russia-Ukraine war
Mr. Putin’s trip to Central Asia was notable, not only because it was the first time he had left the country since he began the invasion on February 24, but also because he had taken extraordinary pandemic precautions. After flying to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on Tuesday for a meeting with the country’s president, Emomali Rahmon, Mr. Putin spent the night there – the first time he has spent the night outside Russia since January 2020.
Mr. Putin flew to Turkmenistan on Wednesday for a meeting of the leaders of the five countries around the Caspian Sea, which also includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Iran. The summit had practical significance as Russia sought to expand its influence in the economically vital, energy-rich region while seeking to fill the vacuum of power left behind by US withdrawal from nearby Afghanistan.
But the summit was also of symbolic importance to Mr. Putin’s audience at home, offering a split screen shot of diplomatic activities and Russian soft power just as Western leaders gathered in Madrid. Mr. Putin handed over two handmade sabers and a chess set from the Urals to Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, the eccentric former leader of insular Turkmenistan who celebrated his 65th birthday; at the meeting with Caspian leaders, Mr. Putin called for more regional cooperation, including a Caspian film forum.
After that, Mr. Putin held a brief news conference for the few members of the press who accompanied him, and rejected the idea that his invasion of Ukraine had backfired because it caused Sweden and Finland to try to join NATO. A Western ally Ukraine, he maintained, would be far more of a threat than the two Nordic countries.
He also derailed the body of Western leaders and responded to a quibble by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week over the fact that he was taken off bare-chested like Mr. Putin was. “I think it would have been a disgusting sight anyway,” he said.
For Tatiana Stanovaya, a longtime expert on the Kremlin based in France, Mr. Putin’s wave of appearances marks the latest recurrence in his frequent oscillation between periods of intense private and intense public activity.
Mr. Putin can be very quiet during high-pressure periods for weeks – as he was ahead of the winter invasion, when he went more than a month without speaking publicly about Ukraine. In the weeks after the invasion, he repeatedly went days without appearing on camera.
But in other cases, Mr. Putin launched a spate of, by Kremlin standards, free-running opportunities – as he did this month when he spent more than 90 minutes in a city hall session with young entrepreneurs, and a week later, when he went for nearly four hours on stage at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum appears.
“After some very hard and shocking steps, he needs feedback,” she said. Stanovaya on mr. Putin said. “He is starting to appear active in public, he is starting to open up, he is starting to be more outspoken. It’s as if he goes out into the light to see what he actually did. “
Mr. Putin’s isolation has been magnified by the pandemic, and has been accompanied, either authentically or by design, with outbursts of remarkable anger and grievance directed against the West. In his speech declaring the beginning of the invasion, he called the American-led West an “empire of lies” and threatened any countries that tried to interfere with “consequences you have never faced in your history.” . ” In March, Mr. Putin portrayed pro-Western Russians as “foams and traitors” who would spit out society “like a fly”.
The ominous use of language, combined with Western arms deliveries to Ukraine and Russian setbacks on the battlefield, has left many analysts – including me. Stanovaja – concluded that Mr. Putin is considering a limited use of nuclear weapons to force the West into submission.
But recently, Mr. Putin turned off the serious threats and returned to a more relaxed public personality. In a casual setting in his town hall, the Russian leader compared his battle to Peter the Great’s 18th century conquest wars, making it clear that he saw himself as a historical figure on a years-long quest for the lost. give back lands – and glory. and Russia.
Nevertheless, predictions that Mr. Putin would make an official declaration of war and install a military concept did not happen. And Western steps that other Russian officials have described as hostile – such as granting Ukraine European Union candidate status to Ukraine and inviting Sweden and Finland into NATO – have not provoked any harsh retaliation from him.
Instead, his strategy now seems to be to wait things out, expecting Western determination to fail under economic pressure and the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to crumble as Russia crushes its powers and cities. And Ms Stanovaya sees that Mr. Putin has entered into a kind of relaxation with Washington, which stipulates that President Biden sets limits on the extent of his assistance to Ukraine in avoiding a broader fire.
“He bets that in time the Kiev authorities will have to accept everything,” she said. Stanovaya on mr. Putin said. Russia followed the statements of the Biden administration closely, she continued, “and decided: ‘OK, the rules of the game have been set. They are acceptable to us. So we can calm down and just wait.'”
That approach certainly involves great risks. Mr. Putin’s apparent expectation that many Ukrainians will welcome the Russians as liberators has exposed his distorted understanding of the country. And within Russia, the effects of sanctions are still playing out – a point underlined by Maksim Reshetnikov, the Minister of Economy, who warned on Wednesday that the unexpected strength of the ruble threatens the viability of Russian exporters.
Yet Mr. Putin did not mention Ukraine or its clash with the West in his eight-minute speech in Turkmenistan on Wednesday, another sign of how he predicts a return to business as usual. Rather, he spoke of Russian efforts to improve transport and tourism in the region and to address pollution and depleted fisheries.
The first Caspian vessel, he said, would sail from Russia’s Astrakhan region to the Volga River Delta next year. The ship’s name: Peter the Great.