Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin arrive for a meeting with members of the government in Moscow, Russia May 6, 2024.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reappointed Mikhail Mishustin as Prime Minister for the lower house’s approval.

Parliament Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said the house, the State Duma, will hold a session later Friday to consider Mr. Mishustin’s candidacy.

Mr. Mishustin’s approval is a mere proforma in the Kremlin-controlled parliament.

In line with Russian law, Mr. Mishustin, 58, who held the job for the past four years, submitted his Cabinet’s resignation on Tuesday when Mr. Putin began his fifth presidential term at a glittering Kremlin inauguration.

Mr. Mishustin’s reappointment was widely expected by political observers, who noted that Mr. Putin values his skills and the lack of political ambition. Mr. Mishustin, the former head of Russia’s tax service, has kept a low profile, steering clear of political statements and avoiding media interviews.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on May 9 that Russia would do everything to avoid a clash of global powers but would not let itself be threatened, in a speech to mark the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Mr. Putin was addressing massed ranks of Russian servicemen on Red Square.

“Russia will do everything to prevent a global clash. But at the same time we will not allow anyone to threaten us. Our strategic forces are always in a state of combat readiness,” Putin said in a short speech as flurries of snow whipped across the vast square.

After calling for a minute of silence, Mr. Putin ended with the words: “For Russia! For victory! Hurrah!”, providing the cue for thousands of troops to answer with three loud cheers. (

There was no surprise. When Russia’s election authorities announced results of the presidential election, Vladimir Putin, who has been in power for nearly a quarter century, was elected for another term. He won 87% of votes, extending his reign for six more years, while his closest rival, Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of Russian Federation, won 4.31% vote. There was no meaningful challenge to Mr. Putin in the election. Candidates who were critical of his policies, including the Ukraine war, were barred from contesting. State-controlled media hardly allowed any voices of dissent. And Mr. Putin’s approval rating has stayed high, according to Levada Centre, an independent Russian NGO, and he faces no visible or credible challenge to his authority among Russia’s elites.

If he completes his term, Mr. Putin, now 71, would surpass Joseph Stalin as the longest serving leader of modern Russia and the longest serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great, the 18th century Empress, who captured Crimea from the Ottomans and annexed it in 1783.

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In many ways, Mr. Putin’s rise to power is intertwined with Russia’s own comeback from the forced retreat of the 1990s, which many Russians call the “decade of humiliation”. He has witnessed the peak years of the Cold War, the collapse of the state, which he called a “catastrophe” and the years of chaos. If in the late 1990s, he was seen as the man who could fix Russia’s problems, now he is the face of the state that’s at war in Ukraine “with the collective West” and has built a water-tight authoritarian system at home that allows no dissent.

Rise to power

Born in 1952 in Stalin’s Russia, Mr. Putin graduated in 1975 from Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University). He served 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer for the KGB (Committee for State Security), of which six years were in Dresden, East Germany. In 1990, a year before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In the new Russia, he started his political career in St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Tsars. In 1994, he became the first Deputy Mayor of the city. Two years later, Mr. Putin moved to Moscow where he joined the Kremlin as an administrator. He captured the world’s attention in 1998 when President Boris Yeltsin appointed him as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB. He never had to turn back.

Russia was in a bad shape. Its economy was in shambles. It was not in a position to challenge NATO, which had revived talks of expanding to Eastern Europe. In Chechnya, a separatist war was raging. Yeltsin, the vodka-drinking, aloof leader who was struggling to deal with the many challenges his big but weak country was facing, started looking at Mr. Putin, the young spymaster, as his successor. In 1999, he appointed Mr. Putin as Prime Minister. When Mr. Yeltsin stepped down, Mr. Putin became acting President. And in 2000, he began his first term after the presidential elections.

Great power rivalry

During the early years of Mr. Putin’s presidency, Russia’s ties with the West were relatively cordial. Russia was taken into the G7 industrialised economies in 1997. Mr. Putin supported the U.S.’s war on terror after the September 11 terrorist attack. In 2001, President George W. Bush said Mr. Putin was “very straightforward and trustworthy”. “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country,” Mr. Bush said. But the larger factors of great power rivalry would soon take over the post-Soviet tendencies of bonhomie. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Russia took a strong position against it. This was also a period when Russia, under Mr. Putin’s leadership, was rebuilding its economy and military might. A year after the Iraq invasion, NATO expanded further to the east, this time taking the three Baltic countries — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all sharing borders with Russia — and four others in Eastern Europe into its fold.

Mr. Putin’s later remarks would show how he looked at the U.S.-led global order. In a February 2007 speech given at the Munich Security Conference (a speech which is still seen by many as Mr. Putin’s foreign policy blueprint), the Russian leader slammed what he called the U.S.’s “monopolistic dominance” over the global order. “One single centre of power. One single centre of force. One single centre of decision making. This is the world of one master, one sovereign…. Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area,” he said.

Having silently accepted NATO’s expansion in the past, a more confident and militaristic Russia appeared to have drawn a red line on Georgia and Ukraine, both Black Sea basin countries that share borders with Russia. In 2008, the year Georgia and Ukraine were offered membership by NATO at its Bucharest summit, Mr. Putin sent troops to Georgia in the name of defending the two breakaway republics — South Ossetia and Abkhazia — which practically ended Tbilisi’s NATO dream. In 2014, immediately after the elected Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by West-backed protests, Russia annexed Crimea, the peninsula that hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Mr. Putin also offered military and financial aid to separatists in the Russian-speaking territories of Eastern Ukraine, which rose against the post-Yanukovych regime in Kyiv.

The conflict that began in 2014 snowballed into a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin ordered his “special military operation”. The war placed Russia on course with prolonged conflict with the West. But Mr. Putin looked at it differently. “He has three advisers,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told an oligarch after the war began, according to an FT report. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Tight grip

Domestically, Mr. Putin has tightened his control on the Russian state over the years. He stepped down as President in 2008 as he was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term but became Prime Minister under President Dmitry Medvedev. Four years later, Mr. Putin returned as President. This time, he got the Constitution amended that allowed him to stand in Presidential elections again. Alexei Navalny, his most vocal opposition leader who survived an assassination attempt in August 2020, died in a prison in February. Boris Nemtsov, another opposition politician, was shot dead in Moscow in February 2015. The Kremlin-tolerated opposition parties, including the Communist Party, do not pose any organisational or ideological challenge to Mr. Putin’s hold on power.

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In the state he rebuilt, Orthodox Christianity holds a prominent place. He is fighting not just a military conflict with the West, but also a culture war between “civilisations”. He is the new patriarch of “mother Russia”, not just the President of a modern republic. This mix of populism, civilisational nationalism, cultural roots and militarism kept him popular in Russia. According to Levada Centre, Mr. Putin’s approval rating stayed at 86% in February 2024, while 12% disapproved of his performance. Levada’s polls show that Mr. Putin’s popularity has never dipped below 59% since he became President. He has mastered a complex model, with regular elections, that allowed him to retain total dominance on Russian politics, while keeping dissent and political opposition under check, something which British historian Perry Anderson calls ‘a managed democracy’. At the same time, he constantly pushed to expand Russian influence abroad, challenging the West.

This model of dominance at home and counterbalance abroad faces a tough test when Mr. Putin is assuming another term. The Ukraine war is grinding on in its third year with no end in sight. Russia, which suffered some setbacks in the early stage of the war, seems to have captured battlefield momentum, for now. But the country is also paying a big price. It lost tens of thousands of soldiers. It is struggling to offset the impact of the sanctions the West has imposed. Its ties with Europe, which Mr. Putin rebuilt painstakingly in his early years of power, lies in tatters, forcing the country to pivot to Asia. NATO further expanded towards Russia’s border after the war began, with Sweden and Finland being the latest members.

At home, there are signs that his regime is ageing, which were evident in the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of private military company Wagner, or silent protests in Russia, including on the election day. But Mr. Putin seems confident and unfazed. In his victory speech on Sunday, Mr. Putin declared that he will stay the course. “We have many tasks ahead. But when we are consolidated — no matter who wants to intimidate us, suppress us — nobody has ever succeeded in history, they have not succeeded now, and they will not succeed ever in the future,” said the Russian leader to cheering supporters, who chanted “Putin, Putin… Russia, Russia”.

Abortions were banned under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin but a commonplace under later Kremlin leaders. Now, after less than a century, official attitudes about abortion in Russia are changing once again.

Although abortion is still legal and widely available, new restrictions are being considered as President Vladimir Putin takes an increasingly socially conservative turn and seeks to reverse Russia’s declining population.

Having embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, he is stressing “traditional family values” — often used as code words to differentiate his country from Western social attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and other policies.

Abortion restrictions in Russia spark outrage as the country takes a conservative turn

Some see it as a throwback to the Stalinist era, when abortion was outlawed in 1936, and women ending unwanted pregnancies often turned to illegal and unsafe procedures.

“My grandmother worked as a teacher in a vocational school. She was telling me stories about abortions being performed with wardrobe hangers in the dormitories,” said Lina Zharin, a psychotherapist and feminist activist in Kaliningrad, where lawmakers are considering banning abortion in private clinics.

“Seemingly, everyone knows about it, about how scary it was, and I think that a lot of people are surprised and outraged that we’re going back to it,” she said.

Two years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, authorities reversed the ban to curtail dangerous illegal abortions. But they didn’t endorse contraceptives, says Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the government remaining “pro-natalist” and wanting women to have children while staying in the workforce.

Abortion became a common way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy amid the harsh Soviet economy, even though Mr. Rivkin-Fish said conditions at clinics often were “terrible.”

“Anesthesia was in short supply. … There was no privacy — you would have your abortion with other people in the ward,” she said. Painkillers were of low quality or scarce, she added, “so women were often in excruciating pain.”

Under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, a movement for family planning and adequate birth control was launched in the late 1980s by physicians who were mostly women, according to Mr. Rivkin-Fish.

After the USSR’s 1991 demise, President Boris Yeltsin funded family planning and birth control programmes, and doctors were trained to prescribe and administer contraceptives.

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“They all went through a federal family planning course that I taught and led,” said Dr. Lyubov Yerofeyeva, a gynaecologist and a reproductive health specialist at the core of the effort.

By the late 1990s, federal funding fizzled because of conservative opposition. Abortion regulations remained less restrictive, however. Women could terminate a pregnancy until 12 weeks without any conditions, and until 22 weeks for many “social reasons,” such as divorce, unemployment or low income.

In 2003, the authorities cut that list to just four: if a woman was raped, if she was in prison, if her parental rights were restricted, or if her husband died or became severely disabled during her pregnancy.

“This was the first sign that I saw that the government is concerned about lowering abortion rates, and they’re going to do so through access, restricting access,” Mr. Rivkin-Fish said.

Conservative law-makers proposed more restrictions in 2011, including that women need permission from their husbands or from their parents if underage; that doctors could refuse abortion if they opposed it; and that a woman must wait two to seven days, depending on the stage of pregnancy, to give her a chance to change her mind.

Ms. Yerofeyeva and a reproductive health group she ran, Russian Association of Population and Development, pushed back against these proposals, and only two were adopted nationally: allowing doctors to refuse if against their beliefs, and the mandatory waiting period of 48 hours to a week.

In 2012, the number of “social reasons” for allowing abortion between weeks 12 and 22 was cut to just in the case of rape.

Under Health Ministry regulations adopted in 2015-16, doctors had to offer women the chance to listen to the “fetal heartbeat” and show them ultrasound images. They also changed an abortion consent form to emphasize its risks, “the possibility of not resorting to it, and the preference of carrying a pregnancy to term.”

Ms. Yerofeyeva’s Russian Association for Population and Development was declared a “foreign agent” — a label that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong negative connotations — and soon ceased activities.

Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova ordered the Health Ministry to look into banning abortions for those under 18 without parental consent.

In a speech to Parliament this year, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko criticised women who prioritise education and careers over childbearing and supported an abortion ban in private clinics — where up to 20% occurred in recent years. He also moved to restrict abortion pills, which are approved to be taken to end a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.