Friday night, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia continued to answer questions in a press conference after his spokesman tried to put an end to it, he delivered a blunt statement about the nature of the truth.
“You can’t trust anyone,” he told a reporter from the Russian state media. “You can only trust me.”
It was a fitting coda for a week when Putin was particularly busy constructing his version of reality at a time when a Russian victory in Ukraine seems as distant as ever. In a marathon of public appearances that began Monday with a televised ride across the damaged bridge from Russia to Crimea, Putin spoke of nuclear doctrine, prisoner swaps with the United States, alleged Polish revanchism and even the “very harsh” practices of European zoos .
On Wednesday, the Kremlin released nearly three hours of footage of Putin’s meeting with his “human rights council.” On Thursday, it released a video in which Putin pledged to continue his attacks on Ukraine while looking so jovial, champagne flute in hand, that some observers thought he was drunk.
And during Friday’s press conference on the sidelines of a regional summit in Kyrgyzstan, the president dismissed the idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could face headwinds.
“The special military operation continues, everything is stable for us there,” Putin said, using the Kremlin’s term for the war in Ukraine. “There are no problems or problems there today.”
Most of what Mr. Putin said repeated his previous positions, and much of what he said was incorrect. Regarding Ukraine, he said that “eventually we will have to make a deal” to stop the war, even though he showed no willingness to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. And referring to the release Thursday of American basketball star Brittney Griner in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, Mr Putin said Russia “will not say no to more of this work in the future”.
But his string of appearances was also a message in itself: that of a president who, despite an economy collapsing under sanctions and Russia’s massive military losses, tries to portray himself as sane, alert and still in charge.
The burst of activity was a departure from November, when he held just one elaborate public event from Nov. 10 to 20 — an absence from the spotlight that went unexplained to the Kremlin.
“He is just showing, especially to Russia’s ruling circles, that he still has the situation under control,” said Grigorii Golosov, a political science professor at the European University in St. Petersburg. “If Putin speaks so much, what he says is not so important.”
Indeed, some of Mr Putin’s comments this week served primarily to reveal his fixation on his own government’s propaganda. During his video conference on Wednesday with a hand-picked human rights panel, he responded to a question about the treatment of Russians in Europe by claiming that “nationalist elements in Poland” “dreamed” of taking parts of western Ukraine – making a baseless allegation one of his top intelligence officials had made the previous week.
He then moved on to zoos: “In some Western countries, zoo animals are killed in front of children, butchered, and so on. This absolutely does not correspond to our culture, the culture of the peoples of the Russian Federation.”
It was a reference, pro-Kremlin media reported, to the Copenhagen Zoo’s 2014 decision to kill a giraffe due to the risk of inbreeding. And it was an example of how Mr. Putin is trying to use all possible arguments to reinforce anti-Western sentiment among the Russian public.
But in Putin’s rule, it is his own words that best guide Russian policy. In that regard, he showed no self-doubt this week, repeating the comparison he made last June of his own conquests with those of Peter the Great, the pivotal 18th-century tsar.
“The fact that there are new areas – this is an important result for Russia, it is serious,” Putin said with a smug smile during his video conference Wednesday with his human rights council, despite his military’s increasingly weakening grip on those regions.
“Peter the Great was already fighting for access to the Sea of Azov,” Putin added, referring to the southeastern Ukrainian coastline now controlled by Russian forces.
The next day, Putin awarded Russia’s Gold Star to military officers in the Kremlin. In addition to releasing footage of his speech, Mr Putin’s office released a four-minute clip of the president having a military chat with the honorees, each holding a champagne flute.
“The attack planes fight great, so do the ‘sushki,'” Putin said, referring to the army’s Sukhoi fighter jets with a diminutive. “Great, just excellent.”
He then justified Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a “But who started it?” rhetorical question, claiming that Ukraine was to blame for attacking the bridge across the Kerch Strait into Crimea, which Russia uses to supply its frontline troops.
On social media, some expressed surprise that the Kremlin released the footage, given that Mr Putin — whose level-headedness and composure are central to his carefully crafted image in Russia — looked like he was tipsy as he swayed. But Mr Golosov said broadcasting Mr Putin looking happy and relaxed as he discusses his country’s deadly war was effective for Kremlin spin doctors.
“Putin must show the public that everything is going well,” Mr Golosov said, “that he is able to talk about what is going on with pleasure.”
Yet Mr Putin also has a global audience in mind. On Friday, he addressed what he believes could be a shift in Russian nuclear doctrine, warning that Russia could change its philosophy to allow for a preemptive strike. US policy, he said, might require a more aggressive stance, even if he left his options open, as he usually does.
“We’re just thinking about it,” Putin said.
