Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an opportunity to gauge his mood and assess his priorities. This year’s – the longest yet, at over two hours – was in many ways his stump speech for March’s presidential elections, without ever even acknowledging the upcoming vote.

Early on, there was an array of the familiar talking points around his ‘special military operation’ – the invasion of Ukraine. That it was forced upon him by a ‘Nazi’ regime in Kyiv and a hostile ‘so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts around the world, [that] not only seeks to impede our progress but also envisions a Russia that is a dependent, declining, and dying space where they can do as they please’. That ‘the absolute majority of Russians’ support it.

Putin opted to pass up the higher-risk option of making it a khaki election focusing on the war

This was backed by the usual mix of threat, bravado, and trainspotterish fascination with the various new weapons systems he has brandished in the past, from the Kindzhal hypersonic missile (that have proven easier to shoot down than expected) to the Peresvet laser complex (that doesn’t yet seem to have been used). The suggestion that Nato combat troops could be deployed to Ukraine floated by France’s Emmanuel Macron provided Putin the opportunity for a similarly ritual warning that ‘they must grasp that we also have weapons – yes, they know this, as I have just said – capable of striking targets on their territory’.

Yet all this took up no more than perhaps fifteen minutes of the speech, rattled through at the beginning to get it out of the way. What Putin really wanted to talk about was the future. What followed was a detailed, technocratic address, complemented by that modern-day scourge, the PowerPoint slide deck, about how Russia was going to be turned into a promised land.

The ironically-challenged Putin quickly pivoted from his not-so-oblique threats of nuclear war (‘the strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert’) to asserting that ‘we have chosen life’, and that Russia, ‘a stronghold of the traditional values on which human civilisation stands’, needs more children (over and above, presumably, those stolen from Ukraine). So there would be more benefits for families, and billions of roubles to support larger families in impoverished regions.

Beyond that, there would more support for impoverished families, a health campaign to raise life expectancies, investment in innovative economies, new university campuses and regional development projects. By 2030, average life expectancy should have risen from the present 73 to 78 years. By 2030, the minimum wage should have almost doubled, to 35,000 roubles (just over £300 a month at current, albeit misleading exchange rates). By 2030, the number of 20-24 year olds should have risen from 7.3 million to 8.3 million.

But why are so many of these targets set for 2030? This is the nub of the speech. On 15-17 March, elections will determine who becomes president. Spoiler alert: it will, of course, be Putin, and he will then be in power until 2030. In other words, this is essentially his campaign speech, even if the only actual election he mentioned is in the United States.

This fits his overall strategy. He opted to pass up the higher-risk option of making it a khaki election focusing on the war, because this is a topic that divides and dismays many Russians. He needs the wider theme of an existential struggle with a hostile West to justify his repressions and explain away the privations of the present, but keeps his discussion of the actual fighting in Ukraine to a minimum, focusing rather on praise for the ‘true patriots’ on the ground.

His programme out to 2030 plays nakedly to a range of constituencies that form the bedrock of his electoral base: pensioners, veterans, larger families and the byudzhetniki (federal and local government employees), all of whom were promised more benefits, more money. Quite how this – along with infrastructural development and regional levelling up – will be affordable, especially at a time when 40 per cent of the federal budget is going on the war, is unclear. But unfunded mandates and unrealistic promises are a staple of campaign promises around the world.

Beyond that, an optimist might wonder if the focus on 2030 might be a hint that he is contemplating stepping down rather than going for one more term in office. Of course, his health may determine his term. However, it may be worth noting that the president who wants to see the average life expectancy reach 78 in 2030 (which is, admittedly, higher for women than men), will have his 78th birthday that year.