On Wednesday, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was touting a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ to the war in Ukraine (see Proposed ‘Fifteen Point Peace Plan’ in Russia-Ukraine War Is a Total Defeat for Putin, but Zelensky Is Biding His Time), President Vladimir Putin gave a speech that did not indicate that he had any intention of settling for less than total victory in Ukraine and signaled a crackdown on elements of his own society.

The first part of the speech repeats his litany of complaints about Ukraine, the hardships imposed on the people of Donetsk and Luhansk (he never mentions that their hardship is 100% self-inflicted by them entering into a state of insurrection, and he never mentions that Russia fomented that insurrection and bears primary responsibility for those hardships), and the indignities suffered by Noble Russia at the hands of NATO and their stooges in Ukraine.

Putin indicates that the economic sanctions are working as he lays about at every imaginable social and economic trope from “property rights” to “canceling” to the dollar’s weakness.

He also gives a hat tip to the biolabs that some claim are producing biological weapons in Ukraine under the direction of the US government; see The Liar’s Paradox and Why We Should Not Trust the US Government’s Word About Biological Weapons Labs in Ukraine.

In his speech, Putin again claims that Ukraine was plotting bloody war against Russia. He also refers to the necessity of “denazifying” Ukraine, his terminology for getting rid of the Zelensky government, and “demilitarizing” the country or disarming it. Somehow this is supposed to create a “neutral’ state rather than a Russian puppet, according to folks like Douglas MacGregor. This, as I’ve said before, makes it extremely difficult to find any face-saving formula for a peace settlement as the current facts on the ground indicate that neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian Armed Forces are likely to agree to disappear.

It is the last section of the speech that is the most foreboding. If taken in context with current events, it indicates that Putin knows he can’t rely on the loyalty of the “oligarchs” who control the Russian economy…and who have had their stuff confiscated by Western governments.