Putin tells West: Russia will talk only on equal terms

MOSCOW: Vladimir Putin, honoured like a Russian tsar at his swearing-in for a new six-year presidential term, had a double-edged message for the West: the Kremlin is ready to talk but Russia is girding for victory in Ukraine.

Putin, who rose to the top of the Kremlin just eight years after the fall of the Soviet Union, will overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia’s longest-serving ruler since Empress Catherine the Great if he completes the term.

The 71-year-old former KGB spy exuded confidence in the carefully choreographed inauguration which the West and opponents, who are mainly in jail or abroad, cast as a fig leaf of democracy covering a corrupt Russian autocracy.

As the Russian elite waited in the Hall of Saint Andrew in the Grand Kremlin Palace, where the imperial throne once sat, Putin studied documents in his office before walking down the corridors of the Kremlin to salute guards, even stopping to unhurriedly study a picture on the wall.

“We do not refuse dialogue with Western states,” Putin said after being sworn in, adding that he was ready for talks on security and strategic stability but only if there was no “arrogance” from the United States and its allies.

Russia’s paramount leader of more than 24 years promised victory and said all Russians were now “answerable to our thousand-year history and our ancestors.”

He left the ceremony to the music “Hail” from Mikhail Glinka’s opera “A Life for the Tsar”. The words “Hail, hail, my Rus! Hail you are my Russian land” rang out in the Kremlin. The original words are “Hail, hail, our Russian tsar!”. “The authority of our president is higher than ever – higher than the American president, higher even than the Russian tsar. So much depends on our president,” said Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

Britain, Canada and most EU nations boycotted the event, a move that top Russian officials cast as pointless and with no significance for anyone but the West.

The main points of Putin’s short speech were: the danger of upheaval and stagnation, and that Russia’s unique civilization must develop with a transforming world.

Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, told Reuters that the election was an unprecedented event in Russian electoral history and indicated a new level of “internal consolidation”.