Lisa Haseldine

At one minute past midnight on 1 January, as Putin uttered the last words of his new year’s address, Ukraine sent six Himars rockets into the Russian-occupied territory of Donetsk. Four landed on a vocational school in the town of Makiivka, which had been acting as a temporary Russian military base, reducing its buildings to rubble. The domestic fallout for Russia is proving messy. From the moment they announced news of the strike, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has made considerable efforts to downplay the death toll and pin the blame for the incident on the dead Russian soldiers themselves. They, the MoD says, are the reason Ukraine knew where to find them.

Following an unusually quiet December for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin has emerged to deliver his traditional New Year’s Eve address. The first since his invasion of Ukraine ten months ago, many across Russia’s eleven time zones will today be glued to TV screens and internet live-streams at five minutes to midnight to hear what he has to say. With 2023 already beginning in half of those time zones, we too have been able to view his speech. In years gone past, Putin’s typically predictable and formulaic pre-recorded New Year’s Eve speech has been a staple fixture of Russia’s countdown to midnight. It is a useful touchstone for Putin and the Kremlin to feign a connection with the Russian people.

Watching Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a Christmas tradition for many. But this year, people are being urged to stay away: Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko published an open letter earlier this month asking the West to boycott Tchaikovsky and wider Russian culture until the war in Ukraine is over. ‘This war,’ he said, ‘is a civilisational battle over culture and history’.  He's right: since February, the Russian state is doing its best to annihilate Ukrainian culture in every possible way: banning and seeking to destroy the Ukrainian language, artists, authors and music. But how far should we go in response? Is a crackdown against Russian culture a wise idea, or does it play into Putin’s hands?

December is usually a busy month for Vladimir Putin, but not this year. In the run-up to Christmas, Russia’s president typically holds his annual press conference. But this time the event has been cancelled. Putin’s annual presidential address to the Russian federal assembly – that was pushed back from the summer – has also been canned. And Putin will also be absent from the traditional New Year’s Eve ice hockey game on Red Square. Putin’s yearly telethon, where ordinary Russians can phone in and have a chat with the president (indefinitely postponed from earlier in the year), too has been axed. Such events in the Kremlin calendar are annual touchstones for Putin to ‘connect’ with the Russian people.

Yesterday, during the largest wave of missile strikes conducted by Russia since February, a shell flew six kilometres over the Ukrainian border into Poland, killing two people. Before any facts had been established, there was confusion in the Russian media whether to report on the story with outraged protestation or excitement. To begin with, Russian commentators reacted with glee. TV presenter and known Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan gloated on social media, referencing recent Ukrainian shelling on the Russian border and taunting ‘Now Poland has its own Belgorod region, what did you expect?’. Nevertheless, several hours after the news broke, a statement came from the Russian Ministry of Defence denying responsibility for the missile.

In the warmth of the Balinese sunshine, Russia has received an unsurprisingly frosty reception at the G20 summit. We are barely a few hours into the summit and the tension is already acute. The source of this tension, of course, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  This is the first G20 held since the beginning of the Ukraine war earlier this year. Ahead of the summit, some member states were already questioning whether Russia should still be allowed to retain its membership of the group. Meanwhile, in light of the war, Ukraine was invited to participate in this year’s summit as a guest. Perhaps in anticipation of this, it was announced last week that Russian president Vladimir Putin would not be attending. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has gone in his place.

Ever since the war in Ukraine started there have been reports about Russians emigrating, either fleeing conscription or simply dismayed at the conflict and Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian turn. Moscow has previously dismissed reports that as many as 700,000 could have fled. But that figure no longer looks so far-fetched in the light of data just released by the FSB saying 9.7 million trips out of the country were made in the third quarter of this year (July to September), almost double the number made between April and June.  This figure was slipped out over the weekend and has so far gone unreported in the English-language press. It’s significant as it covers 21 September, the day that Putin announced his military enlistment plan.

This afternoon, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz goes to China. His one-day visit to Beijing is the first by a democratic leader since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic nearly three years ago. But before he has even touched down on Chinese soil, Scholz’s trip is going down badly back home.  ‘It’s the wrong visit at the wrong time,’ declared the broadsheet newspaper Die Welt. Scholz will be the first Western leader to meet with President Xi since he secured his unprecedented third term in power. For many China-watchers, Xi’s consolidated rule and zombification of the country’s Communist party marks a watershed moment for the country – not one, according to Die Welt, that Germans think Scholz should be lending any support to.

If there is one thing we have learnt since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February, it is that very little he says bears any relation to the truth. For nearly a year, the Russian President has been constructing his own house of mirrors: his rhetoric gives no indication of what is fact or fiction, bluff or candour, hard truth or hot air. Each speech he gives further distorts the reality he presents. Yesterday, Putin spoke at an event held by the Moscow-based think tank Valdai Discussion Club. The theme of his speech was ‘A post-hegemonic world: Justice and security for everyone’. Whose hegemony does this refer to? That of the West – or ‘our opponents’ as Putin ‘carefully’ called them with a smirk. Who is providing ‘justice and security for everyone’?

‘Handsome, rich, lucky, traitor.’ That’s how the Russian broadsheet newspaper Kommersant chose to describe the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after he launched his leadership bid. In a biographical article charting his rise to power, the paper covers his childhood attending Winchester College – the ‘most important event of his life’ apparently – moving through his time at university and marriage, and into his entry into politics. The moniker of ‘traitor’ refers to his resignation from Boris Johnson’s cabinet in July this year before his own first leadership bid. Noting how different both prime ministers are, the paper states that ‘the strange thing is not that Sunak turned against Johnson, but that he turned against him so late’.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is not going his way. As the screw tightens on him, what options does he have left up his sleeve? There remains, of course, the possibility that Putin could, at some point, choose to deploy nuclear weapons – he himself has threatened this enough times. But there is also Belarus. Controlled by Alexandr Lukashenko, currently in his sixth term as president thanks to an election in 2020 rigged in his favour with Putin's help, the country has sat on the fringes of the war since it began. On Monday, as Putin launched his latest attack on Ukraine, Belarus announced that, together with Russia, it was deploying a joint regional forces group to its borders in response to the ‘worsening situation’ in Ukraine.

‘The West has let their mask slip and revealed their true nature!’ That was Vladimir Putin's message to a hall of vacant-looking officials at the Kremlin this afternoon. The Russian president gathered the great and the good of Russia to reveal the formal annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaphorizhzhia and Kherson. But Putin's audience in the hall would be forgiven for quickly losing sight of this. This was a speech aimed at Russia's enemies in the West. Putin justified the expansion of the Russian Federation by insisting that the four now-annexed Ukrainian territories had voted in favour of joining Russia: ‘This is the will of 20 million people’, he said.

In Putin’s Russia, fortunes can change rapidly. A week on from the partial mobilisation of the army, Russians are gripped by the fear that the closure of the country’s borders is next. Those who are not willing to risk death in Ukraine are looking for a way out. In the six days since 21 September, when Putin announced his plan in a pre-recorded television address, protests have sprung up in at least 43 towns across the country; the human rights organisation OVD News has said that more than 2,300 people have been arrested for taking part. According to the official terms of the Kremlin’s partial mobilisation, those with military experience aged between 18 and 35 are being called up first (those holding higher military ranks can be summoned up to the age of 65).