On Friday, President Vladimir Putin turned 70, amid fawning congratulations from subordinates and a plea from Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, for all to pray for the health of the longest-serving leader of Russia since Josef Stalin.
After the invasion of Ukraine triggered the largest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Putin has risen to the Kremlin's top job on the last day of 1999. His army has been reeling from a series of defeats in the past month.
On his birthday, Putin is due to attend an informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States in St Petersburg, the former imperial capital founded by Peter the Great, which is his hometown.
Putin, who pledged to end the chaos that gripped Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, is facing the most serious military crisis a Kremlin chief has faced since the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979 to 1989.
Opponents, such as jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, say that Putin has led Russia down a dead end towards ruin, building a brittle system of incompetent sycophants that will collapse and bequeath chaos.
Supporters say Putin saved Russia from being destroyed by an arrogant and aggressive West.
Today, our national leader, one of the most influential and outstanding personalities of our time, the number one patriot in the world, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, turns 70 years old! Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechens, said something.
Putin has changed the global position of Russia and forced the world to reckon with the position of our great state. The war in Ukraine has forced Putin to burn through vast amounts of political, diplomatic and military capital.
More than seven months into the invasion, Russia has suffered huge losses in men and equipment and been beaten back on several fronts, as Putin's army has lurched from one humiliation to the next.
Putin has resorted to proclaiming the annexation of territories only partially under Russian control and whose borders the Kremlin has said are yet to be defined, and threatening to defend them with nuclear weapons.
A partial mobilisation declared by the president on Sep 21 has been so chaotic that even Putin has had to admit mistakes and order changes. Hundreds of thousands of men have fled abroad to avoid being called up.
Even normally loyal Kremlin allies denounced the failings of the military - even though they stopped short of criticising the president himself.
Putin finds himself confronted with a resurgent, united and expanding NATO despite his insistence that the special operation in Ukraine was aimed at enforcing Russian red lines and preventing the alliance from moving closer to Russia's borders.
China and India have shown signs of discontent, on which Russia is increasingly dependent as a geopolitical and economic partner in the wake of successive waves of Western sanctions.
On Putin's birthday, former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said it was customary to sum up results, but the results are so deplorable that it would be better not to draw too much attention to the anniversary.