Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Putin Looks Homeward, Hates What He Sees

The Russian president's state of the nation address centered on domestic issues, not external expansion

December 3, 2015 at 2:20 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Don't mention the war.
Photographer: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

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Russian President Vladimir Putin's twelfth state of the nation address Thursday showed that he understands the need to refocus on domestic issues after two years of grandiose and traumatic external expansion. It also showed that he still has no idea what to do to pull Russia out of its economic quagmire.

Last year's annual address was heavy on biting remarks about Ukraine's attempts to leave the Russian sphere of influence, revisionist history to justify Russia's annexation of Crimea and sarcastic anti-Western rhetoric. This time around, Putin cut his mentions of foreign policy in half. Ukraine was not mentioned once. Criticism of the U.S. was limited to a couple of contemptuous sentences about its role in the Middle East. Even Turkey, the latest enemy of the many Putin has made since his return to the presidency in 2012, got just three minutes of Putin's time, out of a total of exactly an hour.