IN 2008, soon after winning the competition to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics, Vladimir Putin, the country’s president, announced that “at last Russia has returned to the world arena as a strong state—a country that others heed and that can stand up for itself.” Next weekend sees the opening of Russia’s first Olympiad since the summer games in Moscow in 1980. At the president’s behest, the games are being held at Sochi, an unsuitable subtropical resort, and the government has spent $50 billion—four times the cost of the jamboree in London in 2012—on staging the event. Big posters proclaim “Russia—Great, New, Open!” State-owned Sberbank offers the faintly menacing motto, “Today Sochi, tomorrow the world.”
The Olympic celebrations come after a good year for Mr Putin. At home, he has seen off the huge protests that greeted his return to the Russian presidency in 2012. Lacking any serious challenger, he has felt confident enough to free both Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a business oligarch whom he jailed in 2003, and the Pussy Riot protesters.
Abroad, Mr Putin has used his UN Security Council veto to see off Western ideas of military intervention in Syria, instead brokering a deal on chemical weapons and sponsoring a Syrian peace conference. His brutal ally, Bashar Assad, remains in power. Mr Putin has taken some comfort that NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan has been as difficult and frustrating as the one the Soviet Union endured 30 years ago—and a lot longer (see article). He has raised Russian defence spending. And he has left European diplomats looking flat-footed by deploying a mix of money and threats to persuade Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, to walk away from a trade deal he was preparing to sign with the European Union.
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