President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated Tuesday for another six-year term in a Kremlin ceremony, boycotted by the U.S. and several other Western countries over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin, a prominent figure in Russian politics since 1999 as either president or prime minister, begins his new term more than two years after deploying a substantial number of troops to Ukraine.
In the ongoing conflict, Russian forces have regained momentum after facing setbacks and are pushing for further gains in the eastern region.
At 71, Putin continues to exert significant influence on Russia's domestic political scene. Internationally, he remains engaged in a standoff with Western nations, whom he accuses of using the Ukraine situation to undermine and dismantle Russia.
"For Russia, this is the continuation of our path, this is stability – you can ask any citizen on the street," Sergei Chemezov, a close Putin ally, told Reuters before the ceremony.
"President Putin was re-elected and will continue the path, although the West probably doesn’t like it. But they will understand that Putin is stability for Russia rather than some sort of new person who came with new policies – either cooperation or confrontation even," he said.
Putin won a landslide victory in a tightly controlled election in March, from which two anti-war candidates were barred on technical grounds.
His best-known opponent, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony a month earlier, and other leading critics are in jail or have been forced to flee abroad.
The United States and other Western countries stayed away from Tuesday's inauguration ceremony.
"No, we will not have a representative at his inauguration," Matthew Miller, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said Monday.
"We certainly did not consider that election free and fair, but he is the president of Russia and he is going to continue in that capacity."
Britain, Canada, and most European Union nations also decided to boycott the swearing-in, but France said it would send its ambassador.
Ukraine said the event sought to create "the illusion of legality for the nearly lifelong stay in power of a person who has turned the Russian Federation into an aggressor state and the ruling regime into a dictatorship."
