The impacts are getting closer and closer, faster and faster. But Vladimir Putin is demonstratively reacting calmly to the repeated incursions of armed men into the border area with Ukraine and to drone attacks, now even on Moscow. Often, Russia's president is simply silent, at least outwardly.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS.

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At the beginning of May, there was a night attack with two drones on the Senate Palace in the Kremlin. There, in the heart of the capital, Vladimir Putin regularly receives guests. There are numerous security precautions, and an attack was considered unthinkable by many. Putin did not say anything about the drones. It was not until days later that it emerged that he had commented on the attack at a meeting with editors-in-chief behind closed doors. Putin had said that there was "nothing special" about the drones used, and that such self-built aircraft were already known from missions against the Russian air base in Syria. This was reported by Andrei Kolesnikov, who has accompanied Putin for more than two decades for the newspaper Kommersant. "He didn't seem to attach as much importance to events as the rest of the world," Kolesnikov concluded.

What are the "red lines"?

In Russia, there is often talk of "red lines" crossed by Kiev and the West, respectively, and of a "tough response" to them. In the West, too, some believe that nuclear Armageddon is imminent when Putin's power apparatus complains of a "terrorist attack". But the means used by Russia are conventional and limited to Ukraine. "You have said several times that all the 'red lines' have been violated," Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and one of the most important figures in the propaganda apparatus, told a studio guest on a talk show in mid-May. But who from the leadership of Russia has declared "even once" what such a "red line" is? Television pundits have done so, but Putin himself has never said what is behind the wording. "We can only guess," Simonyan said.

In reality, the formula of Russia's "red lines" was very much in vogue with Putin. Especially in 2021, the year before the big invasion of Ukraine, when Putin put pressure on the West in the struggle. At one point, the president cited "provocations that threaten our very own security interests" as examples of such borders. Then it would be modern missile systems that Ukraine would receive and that could reach Moscow after four to ten minutes of flight time. With regard to the consequences of crossing "red lines", Putin remained vague, but threatened with Russia's nuclear arsenal. The impression that he can always pull an ace out of his sleeve is part of his escalation dominance. "All in all, we haven't started anything seriously yet," Putin said of the war against Ukraine in early July 2022.

At that time, Russia's military prospects seemed somewhat better than they do today. But the image of strength began to crack more and more. In August 2022, war enthusiast Darya Dugina was killed in the explosion of a car bomb near Moscow. In September and November, withdrawals from the Kharkiv region and Kherson followed, and in October there was an attack on the bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow. Meanwhile, Putin appears as if in a cocoon. Even on short trips to the occupied territories, when he meets commanders or has the reconstruction of Mariupol explained to him, problems are left out. When gunmen invaded the western Russian Belgorod region on May 22, the president was informed, according to his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, that a "group of Ukrainian saboteurs" had tried to enter the area; This is now being wiped out.