Putin’s annual press conference: love can save the world

They are brothers in spirit, Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at least on democracy and human rights. But in many questions they are on different sides of the story. It was therefore a surprise that the Russian president at the annual press conference of the marathon on Thursday pointed to Turkish President Erdogan as one of the partners he works best with. Putin said:

– He is a real man, who keeps his promises. He is not a waiter.

No, it’s not. At least not in the Caucasus, where Erdogan has inflicted the most severe political defeat on Putin in 2020, if we ignore the social and economic losses that the crown pandemic has caused. Azerbaijan’s war against Russia’s ally Armenia in the Caucasus this fall was a humiliating turning point for Russia’s authority in its immediate area. The war was aggressively backed by military advisers from Turkey and mercenaries from Syria, led by Erdogan. A strikingly visible Erdogan entered the Russian sphere of influence, leaving footprints that tell the entire world that Russia lost political and military control in one of its strategically most important neighborhoods. Putin thus put one in the face of his good friend Erdogan.

Despite this: When asked what makes the family happy, one of the many friendly chat questions at the four-and-a-half-hour press conference, Putin replied:

– It’s love, everyone understands it.

And continued:

“It would be good if the love spread from the family to international politics,” Putin said. Without even taking a look.

So we know.

The problem is only that there are not so many out there who are so happy in Putin’s Russia during the day. When asked about the near-fatal assassination attempt on system critic Alexei Navalny this summer, Putin denied that Russia was behind him, according to Western leaders.

– Who needs it? In Putin it is about Navalny.

The latest contribution to the news of the assassination attempt on Navalny came this week, when Bellingcat investigators said named officers in the Russian intelligence FSB were behind Navalny’s poisoning in Siberia in August. They base their research, among other things, on the monitoring of social networks and the use of mobile phones.

Putin replied that this information was a laundering of US intelligence material, and therefore tried to delegitimize the news of the Bellingcat revelation. The revelations are embarrassing for Russia, because they also say that the movements of its own agents deep within Russia can be tracked with relatively simple aids.

Many of the questions were about the Corona epidemic, which has hit Russia hard. Putin said Russia was among the countries that had best coped with the pandemic. He said the country is number four in terms of infected, but number ten in terms of deaths, with almost 50,000 deaths. Russia is also doing relatively well economically, Putin said, with GDP falling 3.6 percent in 2020. It is significantly smaller than the United States and also smaller than large EU countries, he said.

Took six weeks before Putin finally congratulated Joe Biden this weekend on his victory in the US presidential election. While Donald Trump has been an outspoken admirer of Putin’s authoritarian side, Biden has stood up to Putin on the same grounds. In 2011, Biden told Putin that if he looked into Putin’s eyes, he couldn’t see any soul. To this, Putin replied that the two understood each other.

How much they understand to each other, as soon as the two presidents, to be seen. But Putin expressed hope that he and Biden can solve the many problems between the United States and Russia. For the record; The frankness about Alexei Navalny is the greatest and perhaps the most important of them.