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07-06-2026
MOSCOW: If Vladimir Putin’s Russia had an official slogan, what would it be?
“Russia is what it is, and we’re not ashamed of showing it,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov once told me in an interview.
That fits but I recently heard an updated version from veteran pop and folk singer Nadezhda Babkina.
After receiving an award from President Putin, Babkina told an audience in the Kremlin: “Russia will never surrender thanks to our remarkable, multi-ethnic genetic code… that holds us all together.
“Anyone who doesn’t like that,” she added, “can go and poison themselves.”
In many ways, the line “they can go and poison themselves” encapsulates Russia in 2026 – unapologetic, unrepentant and uncompromising.
Like Vladimir Putin himself.
Since ordering the mass invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin leader has displayed no regret, no remorse over his decision to attack Russia’s neighbor and no intention of ceasing hostilities.
This week Russia launched another massive missile and drone strike across Ukraine.
The attack came on the eve of the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event designed to showcase Russia to the world.
High-profile Western investors and politicians have long stopped coming. But the organizers say that delegations from more than 130 countries and territories will attend.
For a country seeking foreign investment, more than four years of war with its neighbor doesn’t seem the best advertisement but, as we have established, “Russia is what it is”. Forum or no forum, the attacks on Ukraine continue.
President Putin’s public position on the war is unwavering. He continues to demand that Ukraine cede control to Russia of the entire Donbas region.
Vladimir Putin has not changed. But one thing in the Kremlin has and that is to do with Donald Trump.
Last year Russian officials appeared confident that the US president would help deliver a Ukraine peace deal on Moscow’s terms. In other words, that President Trump would pressure Kyiv into accepting Moscow’s maximalist demands.
Following last summer’s US-Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska, for month’s afterwards senior Russian officials waxed lyrical about the “spirit of Anchorage” as if Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had reached a mutual understanding on Ukraine to Moscow’s benefit but no peace deal materialized.
“I don’t know about the spirit of Anchorage,” President Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told Russian state TV recently. “I have never used that phrase.”
It was a sign that the “spirit of Anchorage” has, if not disappeared, then at least started evaporating.
There are many others.
What the Kremlin leader had conceived as a short-term “special military operation” has turned into a bloody war of attrition which is now in its fifth year. Since February 2022, Russia has suffered huge battlefield losses, significant damage to its economy and technological decline.
What’s more, the war has moved closer to home. Today Ukrainian drones reach deep inside Russia. Oil refineries and other energy infrastructure are regularly targeted. Last month, a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region highlighted that air defences around the Russian capital could be penetrated.
Amid fears of an attack, the annual Victory Day parade on Red Square on 9 May was scaled back. (Int’l News Desk)
