Putin Gets His Self-Confidence Back

In the chess world championship that ended Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin rooted for Sergey Karjakin, the Crimea-born grandmaster who took Russian citizenship five years before Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Putin's annual state of the nation speech on Thursday resembled Karjakin's chess game: The Russian president was almost preternaturally calm and his message was designed to make the best of a bad situation. One might have expected something more flamboyant from a leader who is demonized in the West for betting on today's populist upheavals -- but Putin was quietly confident, and he finally appeared to have a semblance of an economic plan.

After a weak, stumbling, self-justifying speech in 2014, Putin gave maximum attention to domestic policy and kept geopolitics to a minimum for the second consecutive year. But while in 2015 Putin appeared to be stalling for time and told his audience that an economic slump might last for a long time, this time he made clear he saw light at the end of the tunnel.