MOSCOW (NYTIMES) - There was no claim of victory or "Mission accomplished" and no promise that the fight in Ukraine could end soon. But there was also no call for new sacrifice or mobilisation, no threat of a nuclear strike, no stark pronouncement about Russia being locked in an existential war with the West.
Instead, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in Red Square in Moscow on Monday (May 9), on Russia's most important secular holiday, and delivered a message for the broader Russian public: that they could keep on living their lives. The military would continue fighting to rid Ukraine of "torturers, death squads and Nazis," but Mr Putin did not make any new attempt to prepare his people for a wider conflict.
The calibrated tone shows that although some Western officials predicted Mr Putin would use the May 9 holiday to double down on the war, he remains cautious about demanding too much from regular Russians.
The only policy announcement Mr Putin made in his speech, in fact, was one aimed at assuaging the pain directly caused by the war - signing a decree to provide additional aid to the children of killed and wounded soldiers.
"He has developed a certain sense of what is and is not possible," said Gleb Pavlovsky, a close adviser to Mr Putin until falling out with him in 2011, explaining why the Russian leader does not appear ready to order a mass mobilisation. "He understands that no propaganda can by itself force someone to die."
Western and Ukrainian officials had speculated that Mr Putin could use the martial pomp of the May 9 holiday to declare Russia is in a state of war and expand military conscription, allowing him to increase his depleted forces that have experienced so many struggles on the battlefield.
But rather than prepare society for more sacrificing, Mr Putin gave what was, in many ways, a subdued speech compared with the fiery rhetoric he has deployed on other occasions over the past two months; it was also the speech, of all his recent appearances, that the Russian people were most likely to see, since it came during the televised Victory Day parade, the Russian state's marquee annual event celebrating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
Some analysts say that although polls show there is broad support for the war in Russia, there appears to be concern in the Kremlin that this support is not deep.
Mr Pavlovsky said Mr Putin seems keen to avoid doing further damage to the unspoken deal with the Russian people that he fashioned after coming to power: Regular Russians stay out of politics, and the Kremlin largely lets them live their lives.
Indeed, while more than 15,000 Russians were arrested at anti-war protests in the first weeks of the war, the vast majority stayed silent, even if they opposed it. And although Western sanctions have hit Russia's economy, it has not collapsed, allowing many people to continue living largely as they had before the Feb 24 invasion.
Independent pollster Levada found last month that 39 per cent of Russians were paying little to no attention to what the Kremlin calls the "special military operation" in Ukraine.
Apparently keen to limit the scrutiny from worried parents, Putin pledged early on in the war that conscripts - young Russian men are required to complete a year of military service - would not be sent into battle. After many were, Mr Putin ordered an investigation.
A mass mobilisation of the Russian public, or a switch to a wartime economy, would undermine that balance, bringing the reality of war into many more households.
In the most dramatic act of protest, two Russian journalists at a pro-Kremlin news website suddenly filled its homepage with anti-war articles, one of which declared that "Putin must go." "Do not fear!" said the article, posted briefly on the Lenta.ru website. "Do not be silent! Resist! You are not alone, and we are many! The future is ours!"
In his speech, Mr Putin rehashed old arguments - that the invasion was the "only correct decision" because, he falsely claimed, Ukraine was planning a "punitive invasion" of its Russian-controlled territory, and because Nato was building up troops near Russia's borders.
But some analysts warned that even if Mr Putin defied some Western expectations of escalation on Monday, the threat remained high in the coming weeks. Tatiana Stanovaya, who has long studied Mr Putin and founded France-based political analysis firm R. Politik, said that it's likely that Mr Putin simply saw the Victory Day parade as the wrong time and place to signal an escalation - especially because many Russians were still enjoying the country's traditional holiday period of early May.
She said that the greatest danger lay in Mr Putin's frustration at the West's arms deliveries to Ukraine and that he might use Russia's vast nuclear arsenal to deter it by detonating a single weapon to demonstrative effect. In Mr Putin's narrative, the West is goading Ukraine into resistance in order to weaken Russia; late last month, Mr Putin warned that countries that "create a strategic threat to Russia" could expect "retaliatory strikes" that would be "lightning fast."
"In his understanding, the problems that Russia is facing in Ukraine right now stem not from a lack of forces but from the West arming Ukraine," Ms Stanovaya said. "He's at war with the West, so he has to show the West that it must retreat. And he has to show it in a way that really scares everyone."
Indeed, Mr Putin reserved his toughest language in Monday's speech for the United States. It was the United States and its "minions" who were using Ukrainian "neo-Nazis" to threaten Russia, he said, forcing him to launch the war. And it was the United States, he said, that was "humiliating" the world after the fall of the Soviet Union by proclaiming its "exceptionalism." "Without a Western retreat, there's no way Putin is going to win the war now," Ms Stanovaya said.
