Putin Has Decided to Normalize His War

The big news from Vladimir Putin’s almost two-hour state-of-the-nation address on Tuesday wasn’t Russia’s suspension of the New START treaty. That move amounted to little besides an extra humiliation for its Russian signatory, ex-President Dmitry Medvedev, already reduced to barking out ultranationalist invective on Telegram: Now that Russia considers itself at war with the “collective West,” its willingness to keep its end of any prior agreements shouldn’t be overestimated. Putin had to mention Russia’s status as a nuclear power and he chose to do so in a relatively non-threatening way.

The real news was an implicit message that the war in Ukraine is not ending anytime soon and that Russians must get used to living with it — especially as, in Putin’s telling, it presents an economic opportunity that’s greater than the sacrifice it requires. That Putin chose to deliver this message a year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine means he has no idea how Russia wins — and that, for want of better options, he’s decided to semaphore that he doesn’t really mind a long war.

A day before the dictator’s speech, his only credible domestic opponent, Alexei Navalny, laid out his message to Russians and the world in a series of tweets — a format necessitated by his continued imprisonment. The thread is based on a certainty that Russia will lose the war. But, just as Putin doesn’t see a path to winning, neither Navalny nor anyone else who has opined on the subject really understands how Russia might lose.

The conflicting state-of-the nation messages from the ruler and his jailed nemesis describe a country stuck in limbo between victory and defeat, collective guilt and collective defiance, an economy modeled after Western examples and a growing dependence on China. Put simply, Putin’s Russia is incapable of delivering itself from its own self-inflicted misery.