Objectively, he shows an understanding of his adversary (US/West) that I'm not sure our leaders can touch. Putin played to the sympathies of those that think the US, and the West in general, is not doing well socially.
Always important to note that he rigs his elections, murders his adversaries, and invaded a sovereign nation in 2014.
As if the Baltics didn't hate Russians enough, he has to throw my gasoline on that fire.
the February 22 issue of the New York Review of Books review of several books about "Eurasianism," the favored nationalist ideology of a school of nutty geopolitical theorists who are now influential in Putin's Russia. You need to read stuff like this in order to imagine how -- for some, I have no idea of how many -- Russia's war on Ukraine makes historic sense. Dostoevsky in his craziest pan-Slavic fantasies couldn't have dreamed up Eurasianism.
It might nutty as you say, but it’s not new. The NYRB article is paywalled, and I am unable to read it. It may well be that the origin of the concept was elaborated in the article, but I just want to point out that it was popular among 19th century Russian geopolitical thinkers. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the doctrine was resurrected as an alternative to communism and a justification for a neo-czarist, expansionist foreign policy. Brzezinski discusses the phenomenon in The Grand Chessboard (1997).
All of a sudden, you had people who had for decades during the Cold War decried geopolitics as a tool of capitalist militarists now calling for the reclamation of the Russian Near Abroad and referring to the Heartland as if Mackinder were now their thought leader on geostrategy. The case was made that a truly reformed Russia would be in a better position to wield influence and soft power throughout its Eurasian periphery. Again, it might be nutty (Russian messianism is nutty), but there is Solzhenitsyn in 1991 suggesting that “...the time has come for an uncompromising choice between an empire of which we ourselves are the primary victims, and the spiritual and physical salvation of our own people”. The Russian Idea.
Of course, none of this means that Georgians, Armenians, or Uzbeks will begin to think of themselves as “Eurasians”. Eurasia might be a useful concept for geographers and geo-strategists, but Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and all the others pine to be Europeans.
...I watched about 20 minutes of it, jumping forward here and there. Putin has quite a store of knowledge of Russian history and spends a lot of time tying this 1160-odd year period to what's going on in Ukraine, doing so with a rather flat affect. He comes off as rather ambivalent at the end, saying, in effect, "Ah, eventually this will all get settled between the various parties." However, his closing anecdote reflects his feeling that Ukraine is indeed part of greater Russia, at least in part.
(For fans of Eugen Bleuler, I think I cataloged two of the "A's.")
And the 20 minute excursus in history will have too many big words and foreign names in it.
And for Trump supporters, denigrate means “to put down.” (Apologies to Bob Newhart)