As Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state of the nation address this week, offering one social handout after another, praising heroic doctors and vaccine researchers and promising to toughen environmental regulation, it felt like a trip to a parallel reality. Yet notwithstanding Putin’s largely empty domestic exhortations, his message to the West highlighted a radical difference in approach from that of his Soviet predecessors.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
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Leonid Bershidsky: Putin dares to go where Soviet leaders feared to tread
This handout picture released by the Russian Defense Ministry on April 22, 2021 shows Russian forces landing a shore and taking part in a military drill along the Opuk training ground not far from the town of Kerch, on the Kerch Peninsula in the east of the Crimea.
