Amid war crisis, Putin turns 70 with a prayer for his health

Agencies | London          

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

President Vladimir Putin turned 70 yesterday amid fawning congratulations from subordinates and a plea from Orthodox Patriarch Kirill for all to pray for the health of the longest-serving paramount leader of Russia since Josef Stalin.

Putin, who rose to the Kremlin’s top job on the last day of 1999, is facing the biggest challenge of his rule after the invasion of Ukraine triggered the gravest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

His army there is reeling from a series of defeats in the past month. On his birthday, Putin is due to attend an informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States in St Petersburg, the former imperial capital founded by Peter the Great that is his hometown.

Obsequious officials hailed Putin as the saviour of modern Russia while the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia implored the country to say two days of special prayers so that God grants Putin “health and longevity”.

“We pray to you, our Lord God, for the head of the Russian State, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and ask you to give him your rich mercy and generosity, grant him health and longevity, and deliver him from all the resistances of visible and invisible enemies, confirm him in wisdom and spiritual strength, for all, Lord hear and have mercy,” Kirill said.

Putin, who vowed to end the chaos which gripped Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, is facing the most serious military crisis any Kremlin chief has faced for at least a generation since the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89.

Opponents such as jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny say that Putin has led Russia down a dead end towards ruin, building a brittle system of incompetent sycophants that will ultimately collapse and bequeath chaos. Supporters say Putin saved Russia from destruction by an arrogant and aggressive West.

“Today, our national leader, one of the most influential and outstanding personalities of our time, the number one patriot in the world, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, turns 70 years old!” Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said.

“Putin has changed the global position of Russia and forced the world to reckon with the position of our great state.” But the war in Ukraine has forced Putin to burn through vast amounts of political, diplomatic and military capital.

More than seven months into the invasion, Russia has suffered huge losses in men and equipment and been beaten back on several fronts within the past month as Putin’s army has lurched from one humiliation to the next.

Putin has resorted to proclaiming the annexation of territories only partly under Russian control - and whose borders the Kremlin has said are yet to be defined - and threatening to defend them with nuclear weapons.