This year’s Putin’s speech lasted 45 minutes, wrote the Russian agency TASS. It was the shortest speech since 2019 that the Russian leader gave in St. Petersburg.
In the mentioned year, he spoke for approximately 30 minutes. A year later, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the forum was not held, in 2021 the speech lasted approximately 45 minutes, and in 2023, the record length was one hour and 19 minutes.
In St. Petersburg this year, Putin criticized the West for what he described as a “collapse of the rules of world trade,” which he said the West had caused by resorting to sanctions and “theft” of Russian assets at a time when it “started to lose,” causing irreversible damage to the dollar and euro. In addition, he also took on European elites for their “aggressive rhetoric”.
Putin’s speeches in St. Petersburg before 2019 were significantly shorter than those after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine. In 2016, he spoke for about half an hour and in 2017 and 2018 for only about 20 minutes, TASS wrote last year.
The St. Petersburg Forum was held in 2022, about four months after the outbreak of the war. At that time, too, Putin – who started speaking about two hours late due to alleged cyber attacks – criticized Western sanctions and said that Russia always “solves all problems”, The Moscow Times quoted the head of the Kremlin at the time.
