On 19 December 2025, Vladimir Putin did not just speak to Russia: he confronted the West with itself, its strategic contradictions, its headlong rush towards war, and its now irreversible historical decline.

Putin press conference on December 19 2025

The Russian president’s annual speech is part of a long sequence, heavy with meaning and ruptures. It is neither an institutional ritual nor a simple exercise in internal communication. As in 2007 in Munich, when the Russian president directly denounced American unipolarity and the Western security architecture inherited from the Cold War (1947-1991), this speech constitutes a major geopolitical act, in the most classic and noble sense of the term, comparable to the great speeches that reshaped the international order.

It comes at a time of strategic fatigue in the West, indirect military stalemate, structural economic crisis, and accelerated erosion of its normative authority. From this perspective, Putin’s grand speech is neither circumstantial rhetoric nor war propaganda, as Western media circles lazily suggest. It is addressed simultaneously to the adversary, to emerging partners, and to history. But unlike in 2007, it no longer warns: it observes, structures, and assumes. Faced with a Western Europe transformed into Washington’s ideological and military vanguard, Putin asks a central question: who still imposes the rules of the global game, and in the name of what?

The warmongering Europe as an advanced symptom of a strategically declining West

One of the most powerful themes in the 19 December speech is the implicit – but methodically constructed – denunciation of Western Europe’s role in perpetuating global conflict. Europe no longer appears as a balancing force, let alone a sovereign actor, but as a zealous relay for the American containment strategy, devoid of any autonomous vision.

Since the seminal rupture in Ukraine in 2014 following the Euromaidan coup, followed by the major escalation in 2022, Western Europe has gradually abandoned any diplomatic stance of its own. In 2025, led by capricious, insipid, perverse, and narcissistic elites, it has become structurally warmongering, not because of its power, but because of its inability to conceive of peace outside the Atlanticist framework.

Putin emphasises this by pointing out that successive NATO enlargements, in violation of the political commitments made in the 1990s, have transformed the European space into a zone of threat projection, rather than an area of shared security. As a result, deprived of military sovereignty and dependent on energy to the point of industrial suffocation, the Europe of Macron, Kallas, Merz, Starmer, and von der Leyen has locked itself into a logic of permanent confrontation that serves neither its security nor its economic interests. Since Ukraine, it has made a conscious choice to militarise its foreign policy, substituting bellicose rhetoric for diplomacy and Atlantic loyalty for geopolitical rationality.

Furthermore, Western Europe is no longer fighting to defend a rules-based international order but to delay its own marginalisation. Its massive, sometimes blind military support for protracted conflicts reveals less a moral force than an existential anxiety about the loss of economic, technological, and demographic centrality. Energy inflation, deindustrialisation, social fragmentation, political polarisation and security dependence on Washington have drained the European project of its strategic substance.

Putin’s speech reveals a truth that Europe refuses to face: European warmongering is not a sign of strength, but of decline. Unable to propose an alternative international project, it is turning war into a political horizon, hoping to delay the erosion of its global influence. This warmongering stance is all the more dangerous because it is based on the illusion of American protection, even as Washington exploits Europe as a strategic buffer zone and captive market for its military-industrial complex.

Between the lines, Putin’s speech reminds Europe of its historical paradox: it claims to embody universal values while refusing to accept that the world is now pluralistic. This inability to embrace multipolarity explains its shift towards aggressive moral rhetoric, where war becomes a substitute for lost influence. In this sense, Western Europe appears to be the big loser of the post-Cold War order (1947-1991): deindustrialised, over-indebted, demographically weakened, and intellectually sterile, it no longer produces autonomous strategic thinking. The Kremlin leader’s discourse does not attack it head-on; it almost ignores it, which is, in geopolitics, the most complete form of downgrading.

From the 2007 Munich speech to the 2025 grand oral: multipolarity as a fait accompli and global geostrategic rupture

The diachronic link between the 2007 Munich speech and that of December 2025 is central to understanding the historical significance of Russia’s message. In 2007, Putin issued a warning. In 2025, he made an observation. In Munich, Russia challenged unipolarity. In 2025, it is operating in a world that has already moved beyond it.

This is why Putin’s grand speech marks a major turning point on the global stage: multipolarity is no longer an ideological claim but an operational reality. The Kremlin leader emphasises the reconfiguration of economic, energy, and diplomatic flows towards Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He speaks explicitly to the Global South, not as a peripheral space, but as a central player in the new world order.

For Africa, the implications are significant. Russia’s rhetoric marks the end of the Western monopoly on security, energy, and political partnerships. Moscow is positioning itself as a counterweight, promoting a discourse of sovereignty that resonates strongly on a continent that has long been treated as an object of international management. The Middle East, meanwhile, appears to be the advanced laboratory for this multipolarity, where alliances are now flexible, pragmatic, and non-ideological, illustrating Russia’s ability to engage in dialogue with antagonistic players and demonstrating a diplomacy of power where the West offers only sanctions, ultimatums, and controlled chaos.

This shift is deeply unwelcome in Washington, Brussels, and London, as it challenges the very foundation of their power: the ability to define standards, threats, and solutions on their own. Putin states it bluntly: the world will no longer accept a single centre of decision-making, let alone one that preaches stability while exporting instability. In other words, no state, no alliance, no civilisation has the right to rule the world alone.

In 2025, Russia no longer seeks recognition from the West; it speaks to the world as it has become. And that is precisely what makes this speech so disturbing: it marks the end of an era in which the West could impose its narrative as universal truth.

It should be noted that the speech of 19 December 2025 is neither a bellicose manifesto nor a simple exercise in national sovereignty. It is a brutal mirror held up to a West that is fighting less for the international order than for its symbolic survival. Faced with a Western Europe locked into a warmongering mindset, Vladimir Putin embraces the historic break that began in Munich in 2007: that of a world that is now multipolar, undisciplined, and irreversible. Whether we like it or not, history has shifted its centre of gravity – and this speech is one of the founding acts of that shift.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/12/22/putins-grand-speech-or-the-autopsy-of-a-twilight-west-faced-with-the-unapologetic-emergence-of-multipolarity/