MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Dec 8 that he would run again in the 2024 presidential election, a move expected to keep him in power until at least 2030.
Mr Putin, who was handed the presidency by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, has already served as president for longer than any other ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin, beating even Leonid Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure.
After awarding soldiers who fought in Ukraine with Russia’s highest military honour, the hero of Russia gold star, Mr Putin was asked by a lieutenant-colonel named Artyom Zhoga if he would run again, Russian news agencies said.
Mr Putin replied that he would.
“I will not hide that I have had different thoughts at different times, but it is now time to make a decision,” he told Lt-Col Zhoga and the other decorated soldiers.
“I will run for the post of president,” he said.
Reuters reported in November that Mr Putin had made the decision to run.
For Mr Putin, the election is a formality. With the support of the state, state media and almost no mainstream public dissent, he is certain to win.
He turned 71 on Oct 7.
Opposition politicians cast the election as a fig leaf of democracy that adorns what they see as the corrupt dictatorship of Mr Putin’s Russia.
His supporters dismiss that analysis, pointing to independent polling that shows he enjoys approval ratings of above 80 per cent.
They say Mr Putin has restored order and some of the clout Russia lost during the chaos of the Soviet collapse.
While Mr Putin may face no real competition in the election, he is confronted with the most serious set of challenges any Kremlin chief has faced since Mikhail Gorbachev grappled with the crumbling Soviet Union more than three decades ago.
The war in Ukraine triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Western sanctions have delivered the biggest external shock to the Russian economy for decades, and 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 to the day after the mutiny. Since the mutiny, Mr Putin has tightened his control.
The West casts Mr Putin as a war criminal and a dictator who has led Russia into an imperial-style land grab in Ukraine that has weakened Russia and bolstered Ukrainian statehood while uniting the West and handing Nato a mission again.
Mr Putin, though, presents the war as part of a much broader struggle with the United States, which the Kremlin elite says aims to cleave Russia apart, grab its vast natural resources and then turn to settling scores with China. REUTERS
