Putin brags about war during press conference

Six months ago, Putin was on shaky ground. He had just dodged a Wagner-sized bullet and Ukraine was gearing up for a counter-offensive. But on Thursday he basked under studio lights for a four-hour news conference at which he fielded carefully vetted questions from the public and journalists. He said the war was going well, that 617,000 Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine and that there was no need for further mobilisation because the military was bursting at the seams with 1,500 voluntary recruits a day. Despite an occasional cough that he blamed on the air-conditioning, he cut a confident figure, even joking at an AI representation of himself who was allowed to ask a question about body doubles. After two years of lurching between farce and crisis, he has reasons to be cheerful. Kyiv’s counteroffensive has stalled on Russian minefields and more than $100 billion in aid to Ukraine is caught up in political infighting in Brussels and Washington. Putin is in for the long game and with the world’s attention fixed on Gaza, it looks like he’s winning.