The Russian president has often used the meeting to articulate a shift in priorities or to convey new thinking on issues of global importance
Perhaps no scheduled public address throughout the year delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin garners more attention than his speech at the annual Valdai Discussion Club meeting. The Russian leader has often used Valdai to articulate a shift in priorities or to convey new thinking on issues of global importance.
Part of what lends Valdai its aura is that it is explicitly not a policy meeting. The discussions – and Putin’s address in particular – tend to be more free-flowing and wide-ranging than in other formats. The Russian leader often takes many questions after delivering his remarks.
Putin will speak at this year’s event in Sochi on Thursday. RT takes a look at how Putin’s Valdai speeches in years past marked an important shift in the winds.
2014: Multipolarity at an early inflection point The 2014 Valdai meeting came just months after the Western-backed Maidan coup in Ukraine and subsequent reunification of Crimea with Russia ushered in a geopolitical rupture with the West. The year 2014 marked another, albeit less publicized inflection point: This was the year that foreign central banks stopped net purchases of US Treasuries, a tectonic change that may end up being seen as an important early shift toward a new de-dollarized and multipolar economic system.
Putin’s speech at Valdai was significant in that it marked a clear departure from the rhetoric of integration heard in previous renditions. The Russian leader condemned the West’s undermining of the global order with a “unilateral diktat,” and emphasized Russia’s right to protect its interests and sovereignty, positioning Russia as a counterbalance to Western dominance.
Putin said: “In a situation where you had domination by one country and its allies, or its satellites rather, the search for global solutions often turned into an attempt to impose their own universal recipes. This group’s ambitions grew so big that they started presenting the policies they put together in their corridors of power as the view of the entire international community. But this is not the case.”
FT correspondent Neil Buckley wrote that “the speech was one of Mr. Putin’s most important foreign policy statements since he surprised the West in Munich in 2007.” He added that “the strength of Mr. Putin’s language also took US listeners aback.”
Nevertheless, contrary to certain Western perceptions of the speech as being “confrontational,” Putin signaled that he believes “the US and Russia should draw a line under recent events and sit down with other big economies to redesign the system of global governance along ‘multipolar’ lines.”
While senior Russian officials – including Putin himself – had criticized the unipolar world before and made references to a vision of a multipolar world, the 2014 Valdai speech signified an important milestone in the shift from seeing such a transformation not just as desirable but as a strategic goal for Russia.
2022: World faces most dangerous decade since World War II Putin’s 2022 Valdai speech similarly came just months after a watershed geopolitical moment – the beginning of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions that were meant to crush the Russian economy.
In what was one of his longest public appearances since the events of February, the Russian president took aim at what he called the West’s tendency to stoke conflict in order to preserve its hegemony. “Ruling the world is what the so-called West has staked in this game, which is certainly dangerous, bloody and – I would say – dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and disregards any interests of other states,” Putin explained. In their so-called “rules-based world order,” only those making the “rules” have any agency, while everyone else must simply obey, according to the Russian leader.
In the speech, Putin made more explicit what had been implied in earlier speeches: Russia sees the West’s actions in Ukraine as a part of an attempt to maintain hegemony.
Very much in line with the spirit of Valdai discussions, Putin touched on how he saw the larger sweep of history playing out: “We are standing at a historic milestone, ahead of what is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II. The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do it, and most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it,” he said.
“I am convinced that sooner or later both the new centers of a multipolar world order and the West will have to start an equal conversation about a common future for us, and the sooner the better,” Putin said.
Nevertheless, the Financial Times remarked that Putin seemed to “take a more conciliatory tone than in prior months.” He finished his remarks with a call for mutual respect.
2023: Russia’s mission to help forge a new world system When Putin spoke at Valdai in October 2023, Russia had over the summer repelled Ukraine’s much-touted counteroffensive and was in general in a stronger position on the battlefield. Russia had weathered the onslaught of sanctions, and enough time had passed to have discredited some of the more dire forecasts about the Russian economy. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the sanctions were boomeranging on those who imposed them.
In his 2023 speech, Putin emphasized the importance of shaping the future, saying that Russia “was, is and will be one of the foundations of this new world system.”
Some noticed in Putin’s speech a subtle but important shift – it was less about reacting to the West and more focused on taking an active role in constructing the multipolar world, the contours of which were coming into sharper focus.
He claimed that the West had spurned Moscow’s “goodwill” efforts to build a “new and fairer world order” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that some Western powers had “misunderstood as submission” Russia’s “readiness for constructive interaction.”
The Russian leader also leveled a strong critique of the so-called rules-based order, saying: “They try to replace international law with a ‘rules-based order,’ whatever that means. It is not clear what rules these are and who invented them… All of this is done and expressed in a blatantly ill-mannered and pushy way. This is another manifestation of colonial mentality. All the time we hear, ‘you must,’ ‘you are obligated,’ ‘we are seriously warning you.’”
Western media outlets, however, mostly downplayed the multipolarity theme, instead choosing to focus on Putin’s statement that Russia had tested the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable cruise missile – a fact that was seen by some as “ramping up nuclear rhetoric.”
2024: Multipolarity taking shape before our eyes In his 2024 speech, Putin went into greater detail to show Russia as deeply embedded in the project to create a new international order. He spoke more concretely about integration in alternate structures. He emphasized that different formats of Eurasian integration (Russia-China cooperation, the Eurasian Economic Union, etc.) and mentioned cooperation with China in logistics, infrastructure (the Belt & Road Initiative) and the idea of integrating or aligning various regional connectivity projects.
Relatedly, he emphasized the importance of the BRICS group as an alternative to US hegemony and explicitly backed China on its Taiwan policy: “We do support China. And because of this, we believe that [China] is conducting a completely reasonable policy. And also because it is our ally. We have a very large trade turnover, we cooperate in the security sector.”
He also notably congratulated US President Donald Trump on his election victory two days earlier and expressed a desire to resume dialogue with the incoming American leader.
Putin reiterated the inevitability of a new world order. “The former world arrangement is irreversibly passing away, actually it has already passed away, and a serious, irreconcilable struggle is unfolding for the development of a new world order,” he said.
He also described NATO as a “blatant anachronism” that is subject to “the diktat of the older brother,” referring to Washington. “They are in need of a constant adversary to function; that’s what keeps NATO alive,” Putin said, reiterating his long-standing position that its role in Eastern Europe fundamentally threatens Russia’s security.
