In his speech at the annual meeting of the Defense Ministry, the Russian President is confident of victory. Putin promises the army a lot of money to modernize the armed forces and the citizens a lot of money for the welfare state. Russia did not start the war.
In a speech to the military leadership, Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin said he was convinced that Russia was winning its war of aggression against Ukraine. “I am sure that step by step we will achieve all our goals,” he said in a televised speech at an expanded session of the Russian Defense Ministry. He began his speech with a minute’s silence for the soldiers killed in the war. However, he rated the war as valuable experience for the further development of his own military. Putin compared his war of aggression against the neighboring country with the Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812 and with the First and Second World Wars.
The 70-year-old called for a faster upgrade and modernization of the armed forces. The “combat readiness” of the nuclear forces should also be improved. The Kremlin chief cited the use of drones as another example. So far, this has been considered a weak point of the Russian armed forces. Drones must be available at all levels of warfare, Putin said. “Every soldier must have the opportunity to get information from drones.” There are “no financial restrictions” on further upgrading of the army, emphasized the Kremlin chief. At the beginning of January, the Russian Navy’s frigate “Admiral Gorshkov” will also have the new hypersonic missile Zirkon, Putin said at the meeting. The rocket is unparalleled anywhere in the world. It belongs to a new group of weapons that Moscow has been developing in recent years.
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also announced that the country’s armed forces would be significantly increased in numbers. Shoigu said at the Defense Ministry meeting that he was proposing to increase the number of soldiers to 1.5 million. This corresponds to an increase of 350,000 soldiers. The Kremlin chief agreed to the proposals. Above all, the regular soldiers should be refilled significantly. Their number is expected to rise to 695,000.
At the same time, the age period during which young men can be drafted as conscripts will be extended. Shoigu proposed a maximum of 30 years. Up to now, it has mainly been young men who have been called up after the age of 18 in Russia. According to Schoigus, all of this serves the necessary expansion of the armed forces because of NATO expansion. The 67-year-old therefore called for new units to be set up, especially in north-west Russia on the border with the potential new NATO countries Sweden and Finland.
As in previous speeches, Putin did not claim responsibility for the attack on Ukraine. He identified an essential cause of the war in an alleged brainwashing of the former Soviet republics by “geopolitical rivals”. In his view, Ukraine in particular has been manipulated. At the end of the year meeting, the President said, Russia had been trying to build brotherly relations for years. He also still sees the Ukrainians as a brother nation. What is happening now is not the result of Russian politics, but the fruit of the politics of “third countries”.
Internally, Putin tried to reassure the Russians. He promised that the war would not cloud the economic and social conditions in Russia. The economy will not be turned into a war economy. Russia will steadily and orderly improve its military forces without undermining state social measures.
