She says he vacillated through multiple states during the heavily choreographed performance, during which he was pictured in his office looking at his papers before walking along the Kremlin’s long corridors, pausing at one point to look at a painting, on the way to his inauguration.

His guard of honor waited in the sleet and rain for hours, in temperatures hovering just above freezing, while Putin made the brief journey to the Grand Kremlin Palace in his Auras limousine.

James says the former KGB officer, 71, went “from humble during the religious ceremony to smiling and more buoyant as he walked past the crowds, although the ending of the non-verbal narrative saw him in his most familiar display recently as he made his speech: that of aggressive arousal as he spoke of ‘Our plans will make us stronger’ and that ‘Together we will win.'”

Russia continues to gain ground in eastern Ukraine two years in, but President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently avoided a fresh attempt on his life by two Russian operatives who planned to kill him with a drone.

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