Russia: Five key events that affected the country in 2024

As the year 2024 has passed, it is time to take stock.

During the traditional annual conference of the Russian president in Moscow, broadcast to the entire nation on December 19 under the title “Results of 2024 with Vladimir Putin”, the head of state decided to omit certain events in his summary of the year.

At the carefully choreographed event, Putin touched on a variety of topics such as the national economy, falling birth rates, Donald Trump’s triumph in the United States and the war between Israel and Hamas.

However, he devoted most of the four and a half hours of his speech to the invasion of Ukraine.

Although the war is approaching its third anniversary, the Russian leader has referred to it in terms of success. And, indeed, Russia has made significant advances on the battlefield this year.

During his speech, Putin announced that the Russian army was “taking… returning territory” and making “daily” progress on the front, while describing its soldiers as “heroes” and by asserting that the entire war effort is aimed at protecting Russian sovereignty.

Although he ruled out any truce, he said he was “open to agreements” to end the conflict, without specifying what those agreements would entail.

Without going any further, this Monday, Russia and Ukraine carried out a prisoner exchange during which each side released at least 150 prisoners of war.

In “2024 Results with Vladimir Putin,” the president said he was ready to negotiate with Kyiv without conditions, but he reiterated his doubts about the legitimacy of President Volodymyr Zelensky to be part of this process.

But sometimes what isn’t said is more interesting than what is.

That’s why we analyzed five key events that affected Russia during the year that Putin barely mentioned or directly omitted.

On February 16, 2024, Russia’s most famous opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in penal colony number 3 in the village of Kharp in northern Russia.

And although his aides continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, few in Russia doubt that Navalny, who previously survived an attack with the toxic agent Novichok, was assassinated on Putin’s orders.

After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, authorities began arresting their own citizens for making statements or demonstrating against the war.

Navalny frequently criticized the conflict, even from prison.

His death was a dark day for tens of thousands of people across Russia, as the anniversary of the start of the war approached.

While all the attention of Russian authorities was focused on Ukraine, recruiting more troops for the army and developing new types of weapons, radical Islamism continued to grow, both in the Central Asian states and in the Russian republics of the North Caucasus.

On March 22, 2024, in the Crocus City Hall auditorium, located in the north of Moscow, one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russian history took place.

As a result of the attack by Islamic insurgents, 145 people were killed and 551 were injured.

It was one of the deadliest attacks since the Beslan school massacre 20 years earlier.

The Afghan group Vilayat Khorasan claimed responsibility for the attack. But Russian propaganda and Putin himself blamed Ukraine for the tragedy.

According to them, the attackers tried to flee to Ukraine after the attack, where a “border window” was apparently opened to them.

Until the end of this year, no evidence of this had been presented, nor the participation of Ukrainian special services in the attack had been demonstrated.

On September 30, 2015, Russian forces intervened in Syria in an attempt to tip the scales in one of the Middle East’s bloodiest civil wars.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime survived thanks to the arrival of Russian troops.

The permanence of the Syrian leader in power, as well as the victory over the Islamic State (banned in Russia), was presented by Kremlin propaganda for many years as one of the main triumphs of Russia’s foreign policy.

However, with the war in Ukraine devouring resources, Moscow has stopped paying attention to Syria.

As a result, the fundamentalist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham was able to overthrow the regime in Damascus in less than two weeks, and Al Assad had to hastily seek refuge in Moscow.

The fall of the Al Assad regime was bad news for the Kremlin. Even worse would be the possibility of losing Russian military bases in the Syrian port cities of Latakia and Tartus.

If this happened, Russia would have to scale back all its African projects and would cease to be a significant player in the Middle East.

Putin has claimed for many years that he is restoring Russia to “superpower” status, but the bloody war in Ukraine has led the country, at best, to become a regional player that most of its neighbors want nothing to do with.

However, Putin used his end-of-year speech to emphasize his view that Russia has not lost in Syria. According to him, the Kremlin achieved its goals there and prevented the creation of an Islamic caliphate, although he admitted that the situation was “complicated.”

He said he had not yet spoken with the ousted Syrian leader, who fled to Moscow when rebel forces approached Damascus in early December, but planned to do so soon.

Putin said Russia was in talks with Syria’s new leaders to keep its two strategic military bases on the Mediterranean coast and would consider using them for humanitarian purposes.

By the end of 2024, as Ukrainian forces and their allies crossed Russian “red lines” almost daily, the Kremlin found something else to try to deter all those around it, beyond an atomic bomb: the Oreshnik hypersonic missile, the new Russian “superweapon”.

The Oreshnik was first used in the second half of November in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Moscow claimed to have launched it in response to the use of long-range Western missiles on Russian territory.

Putin is so confident in this “superweapon” that he proposed a “duel” during his annual speech: Russia would fire the Oreshnik at Ukraine and Ukrainian air defenses, with systems supplied by the United States, should try to take him down.

Since its first use, there has not been a single speech or press conference by Putin where he did not mention the hypersonic missile, and even Duma deputies have attended sessions wearing t-shirts with inscriptions on the Oreshnik.

Nonetheless, this could be interpreted as a relative decrease in the degree of confrontation, as the Kremlin now threatens its enemies with something that is not an atomic bomb.

In late 2023, the Kremlin established military cooperation with North Korea, a country on which Russia had imposed UN sanctions, along with other permanent members of the Security Council.

At first, due to the shortage of artillery projectiles and ballistic missiles in the war with Ukraine, Moscow began to obtain them from Pyongyang. In exchange, Russia supplied oil to North Korea, circumventing sanctions.

In 2024, Putin met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang. The last time he visited one of the world’s most authoritarian and closed-off countries was in 2000, and the leader then was a different person: Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-il’s father. A.

In Russia, on the other hand, only one person has been in power all these years.

After the meeting, the two countries signed an agreement on “comprehensive strategic collaboration”, which, among other things, provided for military assistance “in the event of war for one of the parties”.

By the northern autumn of 2024, North Korean troops were already on the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine. NATO has estimated their number at around 12,000 troops and Ukrainian authorities have made a similar assessment.

Both Moscow and Pyongyang initially denied the North Korean military’s participation in the war in Ukraine.

In late October, commenting on the fact that Russia was now receiving not only munitions but also personnel from North Korea, Putin referred to the “strategic collaboration” agreement and said: “What we will do and how we will do it is our business.”

North Korean soldiers were deployed to try to retake territories in the Kursk region, which Ukraine had occupied in August. In December, it was reported that hundreds of North Koreans were already dead or injured.

NATO considers North Korea’s participation in the war in Ukraine a “clear escalation”, arguing that Russia directly involved a third party in the armed conflict.

A senior BBC source within NATO also claimed that the consequences of this action will not only affect the situation on the battlefield.

The US State Department believes that another important partner of Russia, China, is unhappy with the growing friendship between Moscow and Pyongyang.