Russia sets presidential election date amid messages mocking the West

As Russia announced on Thursday (7 December) the date of the 2024 presidential elections, Russian president Vladimir Putin and a closest ally banked on an anti-Western rhetoric and on the assumption that Ukraine will become a ‘black hole’ for the US and its allies.

Russia’s upper house of parliament voted on Thursday to set the date for Russia’s presidential election for 17 March 2024.

The decision was passed unanimously by 162 votes in the Federation Council.

“With this decision, we are effectively launching the start of the election campaign,” Valentina Matviyenko, head of the Federation Council, said.

She added that for the first time residents of the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions of Ukraine annexed by Russia would take part in the vote.

“By choosing a head of state together, we fully share the common responsibility and common destiny of our fatherland,” Matviyenko said.

Putin has not yet officially announced his intention to run for a new six-year presidential term.

Ukraine: a second Vietnam?

Russian foreign intelligence chief told the United States on Thursday that Western support for Ukraine would turn the conflict into a “second Vietnam” haunting Washington for years to come.

Putin sent troops into Ukraine early last year, triggering a war that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands and led to the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West in six decades.

The West has given Ukraine more than $246 billion in aid and weapons, but a Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed and Russia remains in control of just under a fifth of Ukrainian territory.

“Ukraine will turn into a ‘black hole’ absorbing more and more resources and people,” Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said in an article in the SVR’s house journal, “The Intelligence Operative”.

“Ultimately, the US risks creating a ‘second Vietnam’ for itself, and every new American administration will have to try to deal with it.”

US President Joe Biden has warned that a direct NATO-Russia confrontation could trigger World War Three and repeatedly ruled out sending American soldiers to Ukraine.

The Vietnam War was in effect an East-West Cold War conflict in which the United States fought alongside the forces of South Vietnam against a north supported by the communist powers of China and the Soviet Union.

The war, in which several million were killed, ended in 1975 with victory for North Vietnam and ignominious defeat for the United States, which had lost more than 58,000 of its own combatants and kindled a powerful anti-war movement at home.

Biden pleaded with Republicans on Wednesday for a fresh infusion of military aid for Ukraine.

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden said, predicting that Putin would go on to attack a NATO ally.

Then, Biden added, “we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops”.

Western sanctions don’t work?

Putin said Russia’s gross domestic product was set to grow 3.5% this year, as the economy rebounds from a 2.1% contraction in 2022.

Russia’s export-focused economy has proved more resilient than either Moscow or its adversaries anticipated when the West sought to punish and isolate Russia with sweeping sanctions after it sent troops into Ukraine in early 2022.

“Today, GDP is already higher than it was before the Western sanctions attack,” Putin told the “Russia Calling” business forum in Moscow. “It’s expected that for this year … GDP will increase by at least 3.5%.”

The Russian economy has been boosted by a sharp increase in defence spending and manufacturing for the conflict in Ukraine.

But it is grappling with elevated interest rates that are expected to be raised to 16% next week, high inflation that will end the year well above the central bank’s 4% target and a labour shortage that has seen unemployment drop to a record low of 2.9% and start putting the brakes on productivity.

Putin, as he has done on several occasions, lauded the health of the Russian economy and state finances, casting the West’s sanctions as an onslaught that has failed to land any meaningful blows.

“The Western financial system is clearly becoming technologically obsolete,” Putin said. “It has been resting on its laurels for so long, becoming accustomed to monopolies and exclusivity, to the lack of real alternatives, to the habit of changing nothing, becoming archaic.”

(Edited by Georgi Gotev)

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