President Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a new six-year term yesterday at a Kremlin ceremony that was boycotted by the US and other Western countries at which he said he was potentially open to nuclear talks with the West.
Putin, in power as president or prime minister since 1999, begins his new mandate more than two years after he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, where Russian forces have regained the initiative after a series of reversals and are seeking to advance further in the east.
At 71, Putin dominates the domestic political landscape. On the international stage, he is locked in a confrontation with Western countries he accuses of using Ukraine as a vehicle to try to defeat and dismember Russia.
Putin told Russia’s political elite after being sworn in that he was not shutting down dialogue with the West but that it would have to make its own choice about how to engage with his country.
He said talks on strategic nuclear stability with the West were also possible, but only on equal terms.
“We are a united and great people and together we will overcome all obstacles, we will bring to life everything we have planned. Together we will be victorious,” Putin said.
Putin in March won a landslide victory in a tightly controlled election from which two anti-war candidates were barred on technical grounds.
His best known opponent, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony a month earlier, and other leading critics are in jail or have been forced to flee abroad.
The United States, which said it did not consider his re-election free and fair, stayed away from yesterday’s inauguration ceremony.
Britain, Canada and most European Union nations also decided to boycott the swearing-in, but France said it would send its ambassador.
Ukraine said the event sought to create ‘the illusion of legality for the nearly lifelong stay in power of a person who has turned the Russian Federation into an aggressor state and the ruling regime into a dictatorship’.
Ukraine’s state security service said it caught two agents for Russia plotting the assassination of Zelenskiy and other top officials as ‘a gift’ for Putin as he was sworn in for a new term.
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