They don’t make world leaders like they used to, as far as Vladimir Putin is concerned. Talking to a Kremlin-friendly gathering of journalists at his traditional end-of-year press conference earlier today, the Russian president spoke with fond nostalgia of the old gang, saying he’d like to spend more time with “people close to me”, such as the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the former French president Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, late prime minister of Italy. High office aside, these men have another thing in common: they are all now dead.
Whether this was Putin’s way of saying that the only good European leader’s a dead European leader or whether it was an arch reflection on having outlasted all three is not clear. What is clear, though, is that if he were to visit the countries they led next week, he’d be liable for arrest under the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in 2023 on charges concerning the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Stefan Wolff, of the University of Birmingham, watched Putin’s press conference as it unfolded. He reflects here on what it tells us about his intentions for the war in Ukraine in 2025 and how that contrasts with the messages emerging from meetings between Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and top EU leaders, including European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the new president of the European Council, Antonio Costa.
