Putin says he saved Russia, but a year of challenges suggests Moscow’s position is precarious

When Russia’s first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, resigned on New Year’s Eve in 1999, he publicly implored Vladimir Putin, his handpicked but little-known successor, to “take care of Russia.”

A quarter-century later, Putin insists he has done just that – and more.

As he wrapped up his marathon year-end news conference on Dec. 19, Putin boasted that he had thwarted efforts by the United States and its Western allies to subjugate Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart.

“I have not just taken care of it, but I believe we have stepped back from the edge of the abyss,” he declared, in response to a question about Yeltsin’s remark.

“I have done everything so that Russia can be an independent and sovereign state that is capable of making decisions in its interests,” Putin said, “rather than in the interests of the countries that were dragging it toward them, patting it on the back, only to use it for their own purposes.”

But as 2024 draws to a close, Russia is in a far more precarious place than Putin’s rhetoric and bravado suggest. His forces are making slow but steady advances in Ukraine, but estimates by some NATO countries suggest hundreds of thousands of Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the war, which has dragged on for nearly three years.

Part of Russia’s Kursk region is occupied by Ukrainian troops aiming to use the territory as leverage in future negotiations. This month, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, was assassinated in an explosion in Moscow. The country’s sanctions-battered economy is under severe strain, with annual inflation approaching 10%. The Russian Central Bank last week opted to hold its key interest rate at a staggering 21% – only after Putin publicly called for a “balanced decision” following widespread predictions of a 2-percentage-point hike.

Meanwhile, Putin’s closest ally in the Middle East, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, was ousted from power and fled to Moscow, leaving Russia scrambling to withdraw troops and military equipment from bases in Syria it had used to project power abroad.

And on Christmas Day, an Azerbaijan Airlines jet carrying 67 passengers and crew members, including Russian citizens, crashed in Kazakhstan after suffering catastrophic damage while trying to land in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechnya region. U.S. and other officials said the plane was probably brought down by Russian air defenses.

Since 2022, Putin has used his invasion of Ukraine to remake his country, building a militarized Russian society geared to confront the West for decades – revamping the education system, monopolizing culture, reshaping women’s roles and indoctrinating youths.

In recent months, these changes have only solidified. And Putin’s conviction that he will emerge victorious in Ukraine has grown stronger in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

During his year-end news conference, Putin said his only regret was that Russia had not invaded Ukraine sooner.

The war has become omnipresent in Russian classrooms. In September, a mandatory course titled “Fundamentals of Security and Protection of the Homeland” was introduced to instill in children “a readiness to defend the Fatherland,” including training to handle a Kalashnikov rifle.

Russian soldiers, including convicted murderers released from prison to fight in Ukraine, are invited to speak to children as national heroes.

The dream job floated to Russian youths is no longer software development. Instead, they are encouraged to pursue positions in “new and promising areas,” such as working on drone assembly lines.

“Still thinking about going to the 10th grade? Join the super elite course at Alabuga Polytechnic Institute to study aerial navigation and drone programming,” pitched an ad for a Tatarstan-based industrial hub that employs students to build Iranian-designed self-detonating drones.

The ad, depicting blond adolescent boys looking at high-tech computers in pristine white labs, targets 15-year-olds who can either complete high school or go to a trade school, skipping higher education.

“Why should the children just learn how to wipe their school boards if they can learn how to wipe out cities from maps,” Mikhail Fishman, an anchor on the independent TV Rain channel, lamented during his year-end show, which he broadcasts from Amsterdam.

Putin, faced with a declining population and the added demographic peril of deploying tens of thousands of young men to the front lines, away from their wives, has found a new fixation: employing every possible incentive to persuade women to give birth early and often.

Government data showed that 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, the lowest birth rate since 1999, a figure the Kremlin called “catastrophic.”

Schools once again turned into a policy testing ground with a new extracurricular class, “family studies,” created to “solve demographic problems.” Course textbooks teach students that women should be obedient, demonize abortion and gloss over domestic abuse to prevent divorces.

At times, the government’s desire for a baby boom has edged on absurd. In November, the parliament adopted a law to ban “child-free propaganda.”

A local version of an MTV reality show, “16 and Pregnant,” created in the 2000s, was originally intended as a cautionary tale against teenage pregnancy and drew the ire of authorities, who sought to ban it for purportedly promoting promiscuity.

That changed in 2024. The show was renamed “Mom at 16” and began to sugarcoat the challenges of raising a child as an impoverished teenager, instead emphasizing the “beauty of motherhood.”

Several regional governments have introduced one-time cash payments of $1,000 to $2,000 for pregnant university students. The payments are contingent on women carrying the pregnancy beyond 12 weeks, which is the legal limit for abortion in Russia.

Some lawmakers have proposed legislation to reduce that limit to nine weeks.

Even as Russian business leaders complain that inflation is choking investment and citizens gripe about the soaring cost of groceries, Putin insists that his country is stronger and better than ever, that Russia is shaping a new world order in defiance of the West and that he is winning in Ukraine.

In a keynote speech at the Valdai forum a few weeks ago, Putin spoke of this new world order as an established fact.

“He seems to believe that he has won the war,” said journalist and author Mikhail Zygar, who, like many critics of the Kremlin, lives in exile. “His address carries the implication that, with the Democrats’ loss in the U.S. elections, the Western world he has fought against is defeated – and Putin is delivering his verdict.”

“He’s waiting for Trump,” Zygar added. “Trump is practically seen as the mascot for the end of the old world order and the demise of the liberal democratic ideology.”

Although Trump has pointed to Putin’s inability to prevent Assad’s ouster as evidence of Russia’s economic and military weakness, Putin has brushed aside the criticism and said he is ready to engage with the incoming president.

In recent days, Putin has also boasted about Oreshnik, a new hypersonic missile that Russia fired at Ukraine in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use longer-range U.S. weapons to strike into Russian territory.

The missile did not frighten the West as much as Putin had hoped, with Western experts doubting its capabilities and Russia’s ability to mass-produce it. Still, it has added a new dimension to Putin’s saber-rattling at home. Fishman, the TV Rain anchor, said Putin had reshaped Russia with three core concepts: “nuclear orthodoxy,” a traditionalist, patriarchal society glued together by the threat of the world’s annihilation; the “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s euphemism for the Ukraine war; and a disregard for human rights and life.

“What power does democracy hold if an Oreshnik missile can melt an underground bunker four stories deep,” Fishman asked.

Outside analysts also see Putin as riding high into 2025, despite the various setbacks.

“Putin has successfully convinced Washington that he is to be feared and that he is crazy enough to drag NATO into war,” analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, concluded in a recent report. “Allies have let their fear of escalation overtake a winning military strategy. As a result, Putin has put a finger to the wind and sees it is blowing in his direction.”