“On the one hand, I’m reassured that the president hasn’t said anything about a new wave of mobilization or a more obvious participation of all of us here in Russia in this war,” says Lara, 26 years, commercial in a state bank. “But, on the other hand, the goals of this war are still unclear and we don’t even know when we’ll get out of it!” she sighs, annoyed.

Like many Muscovites, Lara watched Vladimir Putin’s speech intently on her mobile phone from her workplace. Like a majority of the Russian population, worried and bewildered by the invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the young woman waited with anguish for this speech before the two chambers of Parliament, especially since it had not taken place by the end of 2022, as required by the Constitution.

The river speech – the longest of all his speeches to both Houses – hardly added anything new, except at the end, when the head of state, with a hoarse voice but with the countenance and tone forcefully, announced that Russia was suspending its participation in the New Start agreement with the United States on strategic nuclear disarmament.

He justified his decision by flying drones – “modernized with the help of the West” – over two Russian airports in December, Engels and Ryazan. To add, almost mischievous and sure of its effect, that if the United States was about to proceed first to new nuclear tests, Russia also reserved the right to proceed with it. “That moment stuck with me,” Lara says, “because it’s as if the president was talking about the Cold War…”

Another revealing moment: when the Russian president, almost beside himself, mentioned the name of a new brigade of Ukrainian alpine hunters officially named “Edelweiss” (the name of a mountain flower), according to him in reference to the division Nazi who bore the same name. According to Lara, many Russians, even against the war, may wonder why this denomination was chosen by the Ukrainian president.

To the great displeasure of the young woman, and of an entire young population far from politics, Vladimir Putin did not breathe a word on the means of stopping this war, nor on what he proposed to succeed in living under these conditions. radically different.

The old, overly liberal elites of the 1990s – when “Western advisers came to lecture us, remember? he slipped – were, according to Putin, mistaken and not patriotic enough. Here are the new elites, seemed to say the Russian head of state, whose remarks were immediately illustrated by the director of the retransmission.

Sitting alongside Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Defense colleague Sergei Shoigu kept a closed and impassive face throughout the speech. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, very talkative on his Twitter feed, did not seem to be present, when he had been announced.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, suspected of not being a cantor of war, and who did everything to ensure that his city sent very few mobilized soldiers to participate in the “special military operation”, was not shown either. .

The official RIA-Novosti news agency did the tally: the room applauded 53 times and stood up 4 times. But not when Vladimir Putin suddenly mentioned the suspension of the nuclear agreement. At this precise moment, a single man, in military uniform and filmed from behind by the director, got up from his seat, but he was not followed by the room, proof that the atmosphere was circumspect.