Putin, the expert: Tsar in defense, sails on sight. “He fears that the Russians will leave him alone”

“A subdued parade, without proclamations and planes to draw a zeta in the sky. Almost isolationist. With the usual anti-Western rhetoric but without new messages, which, moreover, was expected in Moscow. With a Putin without vision, without prospects, contradictory, almost in confusion. A parade in which the Russian president paid more attention to justify himself than to threaten “. Thus Nona Mikhelidze – Georgian, studies in Tiblisi, Berlin and the Normale di Pisa, research manager of the Institute of International Affairs since 2008 – reads Putin’s speech, which she listened to in Russian and which she also evaluates the nuances of. We feared a Putin attacking, we saw a leader almost perched in defense of his actions. Is he surprised? “No, this is his narrative style, which he has always carried on. To justify the attack he always says that he did it for a preventive defense. He speaks to the Russian public, but also to those who support him abroad. And between them this works very well, given the debate in Italy focused on the reasons that Putin had after the alleged NATO provocations. Putin used the usual vocabulary, which denotes not only a military stalemate but also and above all a political stalemate “. Isn’t that why he hasn’t pressed the accelerator? “Because he has probably not yet decided what to do, how far to go, when to put an end to this adventure. It is as if the war has reached a plateau and Putin does not know what to do. He is disappointed, but he cannot show it, he wanted to a victory and there is no victory yet. Sail on sight. But he was surprised by the international response alongside Ukraine and understood that escalation is not in his interest. Not surprisingly he said we must avoid a war which takes two very dangerous options off the table: …