Russia launched another massive missile and drone attack across Ukraine this week just as the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum was about to open, turning a showcase event for the Kremlin into a reminder that the war is still very much alive. The forum is meant to project confidence and reach, but the strike landed on the eve of a gathering that organisers said would draw delegations from more than 130 countries and territories.
That timing matters because President Vladimir Putin is still pressing the same hard line he has held since the invasion began: Ukraine must give Russia the whole of Donbas, and he has shown no regret, no remorse and no intention of stopping the fighting. In other words, the forum begins with the Kremlin trying to sell strength abroad while its army keeps pounding a neighbour that Moscow insists must accept defeat on Russian terms.
The public language around that possibility has shifted, too. Last year Russian officials sounded confident that the US president would help deliver a peace deal on Moscow's terms after the US-Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska, and for months they spoke about the supposed “spirit of Anchorage” as if a breakthrough were within reach. But Yuri Ushakov undercut that story recently on Russian state TV, saying, “I don't know about the spirit of Anchorage,” and “I have never used that phrase.”
The Kremlin's own stagecraft at the forum has only sharpened the contrast. Nadezhda Babkina, who received an award from Putin in the Kremlin, told the audience that “Russia will never surrender thanks to our remarkable, multi-ethnic genetic code... that holds us all together.” She then added that anyone who does not like that “can go and poison themselves,” a line that captured the mood more plainly than any official speech. It echoed the language of Sergei Lavrov, who once said, “Russia is what it is, and we're not ashamed of showing it.”
What comes next is not a diplomatic turn so much as a test of whether the forum can produce any real opening at all while the war keeps setting the terms. For now, Putin is using the week to project defiance, not compromise, and the missiles over Ukraine have done more to define the forum than any delegation walking its halls.
