Russian President Vladimir Putin did not start his annual end-of-year press conference this morning by talking about the war in Ukraine, or the "special military operation" as the Kremlin calls the three-year conflict.
Instead, he chose to talk about food prices and everyday domestic topics like meat and milk consumption.
He wanted to reassure Russians living with growing inflation – it's now 9% – and a base interest rate of 21% that the country’s economy is stable.
Thirty minutes into the monologue, Russia’s leader moved on to the war.
He told Russians that their armed forces were about to achieve the original goals of the "special military operation" in Ukraine.
It sounded like he was starting to spin a version of the war that defines Russian forces as the winners.
A peace deal that freezes the frontlines and allows Russia to de facto govern occupied eastern Ukraine will be easier for Mr Putin to sell to the Russian public as a victory.
He also claimed that Russian troops were capturing square kilometres of territory every day, not just 200 or 300 metres.
It is a claim that most Western military analysts would dispute. There was no mention from the Russian president of the estimated 30,000 casualties that western analysts believe Russia is losing on the battlefield each month.
The big take away from the event was that Mr Putin said he was ready to meet US President-elect Donald Trump and that Russia was ready to compromise with Ukraine.
But even on this point, there were mixed signals.
He said he was prepared for "negotiations and compromises" on the war in Ukraine but, at the same time, said Russia won’t give up occupied Ukrainian territory.
Keeping one-fifth of Ukrainian territory won't sound like a compromise to Ukrainians fighting to retain their internationally recognised borders from 1991.
Watching the conference, you got the Kremlin’s version of the war.
Mr Putin talked about Ukrainian rule in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine as being a thing of the past.
He talked up reconstruction projects in Russian-occupied Mariupol, a city in southern Ukraine that Russian forces levelled with heavy artillery in 2022, and assured an elderly man living in occupied Ukraine – calling in with a question via video link – that he would get a Russian state pension.
Questions from Russian journalists and members of the public were not designed to challenge the president. The two journalists tasked with questioning the president on stage smiled and agreed with their guest.
The real point here was to show that Mr Putin controls all levels of decision-making, from the minutiae of economic policy to foreign policy and waging war.
Tuesday morning’s assassination by Ukraine's security services of Russian lieutenant-general Igor Kirillov in Moscow was discussed, with Mr Putin saying it was a terrorist act.
Ukraine has said that Kirillov was a legitimate target.
Syria got a mention too. The message: Russia had not wasted its time and money there.
No Russian journalist questioned why the Russian president, for almost a decade, helped to prop up a regime that tortured and murdered thousands of its own people using the most appalling methods.
And that sums up the choreographed manner of this annual event and the way Russia itself is run. For if this were a real press conference and not an information loop, Russian journalists would press their leader for those kinds of hard answers.
