As Vladimir Putin spoke to a crowd in early February attending the “Everything for Victory” forum in Tula, a city 180 kilometres south of Moscow, he joked that he wanted to give the sanction-imposing West a “well-known gesture,” but wouldn’t because there were “a lot of girls” in the audience, and implied it would be rude.
Instead, the Russian president boasted about the country’s economy, and its ability to ramp up its military industrial complex, in the face of unprecedented sanctions.
“They predicted a recession, failure, collapse,” he told the crowd, which included factory employees, on Feb. 2.
“The entire economy has demonstrated resilience.”
Putin doesn’t
