ST PETERSBURG: President Vladimir Putin faced two rival outlines of Russia’s future on Thursday as he hosted his premier annual investment conference with the war in Ukraine unabated. Some participants at the glitzy St Petersburg International Economic Forum said Russia should fight on and gird for global confrontation with the West. Others highlighted the economic benefits to be reaped from ending a war that came almost to the forum’s doorstep when Ukrainian drones hit a St Petersburg oil terminal and naval base on Wednesday, sending smoke billowing over parts of the city. The conflicting narratives illustrate the debate underway among political and business leaders over what the future might hold for Russia, and the domestic influences on Putin after more than four years of war in Ukraine.
Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Maxim Oreshkin, told the conference it was pointless to expect the old days to return or for the West to lift sanctions. “You should not wait for something to change, for something to come back; it will not come back and it will not change,” Oreshkin said.
Putin, 73, has long ruled by balancing the views of different Kremlin factions vying for influence with the man who has been Russia’s paramount leader for the past quarter of a century. Signs that the $3-trillion economy is stagnating as the war drags on with no end in sight have strengthened the arguments of some within the “elite” that the war should be ended and peace struck with the mediation of US President Donald Trump.
But some nationalists see the war as merely the first stage of a much deeper global confrontation with what they say is a declining West that means years — or even decades — of possibly global war.
“We have to admit that we will be at war in the next few years, maybe for a couple of decades,” said Andrey Bezrukov, a former spy arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2010 while living under a false identity in the United States.
“It may be a very hot war, it may be a creeping war. Even if it goes to other regions, we will have two generations that can be considered basically to be at war. And we need to learn how to live with this war,” Bezrukov said to applause in a packed hall. – Reuters
