Vladimir Putin speaks often, and at length, about conservative values. Europe and the US want to impose their debauched and godless ways on us, he tells Russians, to frighten them and to justify a standoff against “the collective west”. On the subject of the war, he expounds that only the Russian army can save Ukrainian schoolchildren from “gender-neutral toilets”. His electoral manifesto places a heavy emphasis on the family as the basis of Russian society, and on his commitment to tradition and religious belief.
All this rhetoric is pure hypocrisy. Conservative discourse is, for Putin, no more than a political tool for manipulating the consciousness of the populace. The reality is that the Russian president leads an immoral life, wholly contrary to the values he purports to embody.
