Putin to give key speech as Ukraine war nears a year and support dips
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President Vladimir Putin announced in a state of the nation address Tuesday that Moscow is “suspending” its participation in the New START nuclear nonproliferation agreement, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia.
Putin said Russia will not “withdraw” completely from the treaty, which has been extended to run through Feb. 4, 2026, but he said that Russia would not allow NATO countries to inspect its nuclear arsenal. He accused the alliance of helping Ukraine conduct drone strikes on Russian air bases that host strategic bombers that are part of the country’s strategic deterrence.
The 2011 treaty placed “verifiable limits” on the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads deployed by the countries.
“Our relations have degraded and that’s completely and utterly the U.S.’s fault,” Putin said.
The U.S. previously accused Russia of not complying with the treaty. The Russian leader said Russia will be ready to conduct nuclear tests in case the U.S. conducts them first. Other nonproliferation agreements, including the Intermediate Nuclear Forces of INF treaty, have fallen apart in recent years.
“If the U.S. conducts tests, then so will we,” Putin said. “Nobody should have any illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed.”
In a broad speech, Putin ranged from accusing the West of a plot to destroy Russia to promising to build a new highway from Moscow to Vladivostok. He attempted to portray Russia as open and resilient, ascending to the lost status of an independent superpower in a neo-Soviet vision for Russia’s future.
The Russian leader pointedly steered clear of his disastrous military defeats in Ukraine and growing casualties, glossed over economic challenges brought on by the war, and portrayed the international isolation as a way for Russia to cleanse itself from harmful alien ideologies.
Putin kicked off the speech with an already routine mix of fervent anti-Western attacks and conspiratorial tropes about Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime,” once again falsely claiming that the war was initiated by the West, forcing Russia to respond. The Russian president, who for most of the first year of his full-scale invasion refused to use the word “war,” used it during his speech but only to cast blame on others for the military conflict that began on his orders.
“They were the ones who started the war,” Putin said, referring to Ukraine and Western “elites” supporting Kyiv. “We used force and continue to use it to stop it.”
While Putin has often said that Russia acted in response to the 2013-14 pro-democracy Maidan revolution in Ukraine, it was Russia that invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, a move that fomented a war in the eastern Donbas region in which the Kremlin armed and supported pro-Russian separatists ever since.
Putin accused the West of “using Ukraine both as a battering ram against Russia and as a training ground,” warning that increased Western military aid would prompt a tougher response from Russia: “One circumstance should be clear to everyone — the more long-range Western systems will come to Ukraine, the further we will be forced to push the threat away from our borders.”
Putin skipped a similar speech to lawmakers last year and it marks his first public comments after President Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday meant as a show of solidarity and the unity of Western allies behind Ukraine.
“Putin’s war of conquest is failing,” Biden said Monday in a joint statement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Kremlin has notched incremental gains in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, but its grinding efforts have not delivered any particularly symbolic victories, such as a conquest of Bakhmut.
Typically, more than 1,000 guests are in attendance for Putin’s state of the nation speech, including lawmakers, judges, regional administrative officials and religious leaders, Tass reported. This year, Putin has also asked veterans of his invasion to attend.
Putin, czar with no empire, needs military victory for his own survival
The address takes place exactly a year after Putin declared two eastern regions of Ukraine under the control of Russian proxies — Donetsk and Luhansk — to be sovereign states, falsely accusing Kyiv of committing genocide there and paving the way for the war. In September, Putin illegally claimed the annexation of those regions and two others, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, declaring that Russia would use all means at its disposal to defend them.
Putin, 70, is increasingly isolated and faces pressure on all sides. Many elite business executives and officials are privately convinced the war was a mistake, even as hard-line nationalists criticize Russian military commanders and press for a sharp escalation to crush Ukrainian resistance.
Recent polls reflect declining levels of support in Russia for continued fighting, while Western analysts estimate the war has killed tens of thousands of the Kremlin’s troops and led to a historic exodus from the country. Nearly half of respondents to a poll said they were nervous or cautious about the future of Russia, said the Levada Center, the country’s most reputable social researcher, in February. Slightly more than 50 percent supported peace talks with Ukraine, the center found in a November survey.
Western officials have in recent weeks pledged heavier arms and ammunition to Ukraine in anticipation of a Russian spring offensive. But the shape of the war remains unclear, with no guarantee that Western public opinion will continue to be as strongly in support of Kyiv, The Washington Post has reported.