Putin may soon say he will run in Russia’s 2024 election: Report
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Mr Vladimir Putin has led Russia since the last day of 1999.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon indicate he will take part in the 2024 presidential election,
Officials suspect that, as part of a conference in November, Mr Putin may announce he will take part in the election in March 2024, Kommersant reported, citing unidentified sources close to the Putin administration.
The newspaper, one of Russia’s most respected, said there were, however, other scenarios for what Mr Putin might do at the conference, and the final decision rested with him.
The Kremlin said it knew nothing about the newspaper report that Mr Putin could announce in November that he will run for office again.
Mr Putin, who was handed the presidency by Mr Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, has been leader for longer than any other Russian ruler since Soviet revolutionary Josef Stalin, beating even Mr Leonid Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure.
Mr Putin turns 71 on Saturday.
While many diplomats, spies and officials have said they expect Mr Putin to stay in power for life, there has yet to be any confirmation of his plans to run in the 2024 presidential race.
Mr Putin said in September that he would make an announcement on his plans only after Parliament called the presidential election, due by law to be done in December.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in September that if Mr Putin decided to run, then no one would be able to compete with him.
While Mr Putin may face no competition for votes, the former KGB spy faces the most serious set of challenges any Kremlin chief has faced since Mr Mikhail Gorbachev grappled with the crumbling Soviet Union about 30 years ago.
The war in Ukraine has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the biggest external shock to the Russian economy in decades. Mr Putin faced a failed mutiny by Russia’s most powerful mercenary, Mr Yevgeny Prigozhin, in June.
Mr Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash two months later.
The West casts Mr Putin as a war criminal and a dictator who has led Russia into an imperial-style conflict that has weakened the country and forged Ukrainian statehood while uniting the West and handing Nato a post-Soviet mission of opposing Russia.
Mr Putin, though, presents the war as part of a much bigger struggle with the United States, which the Kremlin elite says aims to cleave Russia apart and grab its natural resources, and then turn to settling scores with China.
The former Soviet spies who wield power in Moscow have repeatedly warned of the risk of a Russia-Nato conflict as the West’s post-Cold War dominance wanes, Russia lays to rest the humiliations of the Soviet collapse and China rises to superpower status.
The West says it does not want a Nato-Russia conflict but simply to help Ukraine defeat Russian forces. The Kremlin says the West will never achieve Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. REUTERS
