Well, Putin’s speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which some pro-Kremlin channels promoted as a monumental programmatic speech, is over. And in the end it turned out to be much ado about nothing. Everything was the same as usual, with nothing significantly new.
In the war in Ukraine, the West is to blame for preventing Russia from seizing neighboring states or parts of their territory and deciding where they should join or not. Seeking to eliminate a neighboring state (see Medvedev’s statement that Ukraine will not exist on the map of the world), Russia ends up defending its own sovereignty. Europe is disintegrating, and soon fascists will come to power there. For Russia, on the contrary, sanctions are a blessing and open up new opportunities.
As for what SHOULD be done in Russia, this is already a genre classic, which can be described by the well-known Putin phrase «there is no time for rocking the boat». One channel summed it up succinctly: «Next year we will launch a large-scale plan to repair roads in the regions; adjust the health and education systems to support families with children; launch a comprehensive program to modernize housing and municipal services; launch a program to restore rural cultural houses and modernize rural areas. Finally, it is proposed to preserve Lake Baikal. In other words, President Putin is proposing to do as an extraordinary initiative what should have been done at the regional and city level during his entire term in office under the usual regime».
Well, but seriously, the sleepy and gloomy faces of those who had to listen to this speech in the hall were much more important than its empty content, clearly showing that there will be no breakthroughs in Russia’s development under their leadership. Therefore, big businessmen, to whom Putin called in his speech to tie their future and the future of their children to the Russia he has conquered, seeing all this, will only smile and make even greater efforts to think about how to obtain citizenship in developed countries and transfer their assets there. And not only them, but all reasonable people who have the opportunity to do so.
As for international politics, the composition of the participants in the recent forum shows that the attempts of Putin’s Russia to present itself as the leader of a coalition dissatisfied with Western hegemony are just empty talk. Otherwise, among the participants of the Forum we would have seen Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi and other leaders who could have formed such a coalition and an alternative to the Western world order. But they already know very well the price of his words. That’s why Putin stood alone in front of his sleepy officials and urged them to do what they’ve had more than 20 years to do. And this fact says more about their prospects than anything else.