“God save the Tsar!”: Putin celebrated his 72nd birthday in Russia

President Vladimir Putin was hailed as “Tsar” by some supporters on his 72nd birthday on Monday. They said the former KGB spy had brought Russia off its knees and would bring about victory over the West in the Ukraine war.

Putin, who took the top job in the Kremlin just eight years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin, who died at his dacha outside Moscow in 1953 at the age of 74.

Portrayed by Western leaders as an autocrat, murderer and war criminal, Putin has seen a surge in his popularity in Russia since he ordered thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, according to Russian opinion polls.

“God save the tsar!” wrote the ultranationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, who has long advocated the unification of Russian-speaking and other territories into a vast new Russian empire, which he believes must include Ukraine.

“Putin rules the country confidently and without haste. And it will always be that way – well, almost,” Dugin added in his birthday greeting, which he posted on his news channel Telegram a few minutes after midnight.

Unlike most of Russia’s historical leaders, Putin has no visible successor. According to several Russian sources, he also has no serious competitors.

He now finds himself in what Russian officials say is the most serious confrontation with the West since the depths of the Cold War – whose combined economies are at least 20 times larger than Russia’s.

Opponents say the early setbacks in the invasion highlighted Russia’s weakness, although U.S. generals say Moscow quickly learned from its failures and adapted to the demands of the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

Russia, like Ukraine, suffered heavy losses of men in the war, and in 2023 Putin faced a failed mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary group Wagner. Prigozhin’s plane crashed two months to the day after the mutiny.

Putin, who was born in Leningrad just seven years after World War II, has promised Russians a victory in the Ukraine war, which he portrays as a proxy conflict between holy Russia and an arrogant West that he says has humiliated Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed.

As the West increased its support for Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars in aid pledges, Putin reiterated his bet on war and used the West’s response to portray the conflict as an existential struggle for Russia’s future.

Russians increasingly see Putin as a figure who has succeeded in changing the world order to their advantage, according to a report published Monday by Moscow-based consulting firm Minchenko Consulting.

“In domestic politics, Vladimir Putin every year acquires completely new features of the archetypal image of the creator who is creating a new world order in which Russia will play a completely new role,” said Minchenko Consulting.

Western leaders have repeatedly said that Putin should not win the war and that if he did, the West’s enemies would be emboldened and Putin could try to attack a NATO member – a claim Putin has repeatedly rejected.

Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine and Putin has increased defense spending to Cold War levels.

Currently, Russia controls a little less than a fifth of Ukraine – including Crimea, annexed in 2014, about 80% of Donbass in eastern Ukraine, about 71% of the Kherson region and 72% of the Zaporizhzhia region.

The opponents have either left Russia, died or are silent. Russia’s opposition, almost entirely abroad, is divided and has not found a new leader since the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in February.

Navalny described Putin’s Russia as a fragile criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who only care about money. He had long predicted that Russia could face seismic political unrest, including revolution.

“With Putin we will be victorious,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, said on Monday. “A strong president is a strong Russia.”