Unpredictable strongman? Two years after the war, Putin embraces the image.

After President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “crazy SOB” this week, the Kremlin quickly issued a stern condemnation.

But the image of an unpredictable strongman ready to escalate his conflict with the West is one that Putin has fully embraced after two years of all-out war.

At home, the Kremlin is maintaining a mystery over the circumstances of Aleksei A. Navalny’s death last week, preventing the opposition leader’s family from reclaiming his body.

In Ukraine, Putin is pressuring his military to continue the brutal offensive, bragging on television that he stayed up all night as the city of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces.

And in space, U.S. officials warn, Russia may be planning to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit aboard a satellite, which would violate one of the last arms control treaties.

Putin, 71, who has been in power since 1999, will extend his rule until 2030 in next month’s Russian elections. As the vote approaches, he is fueling his increasingly public image of himself as a leader who is making history and carrying on the legacy of past rulers who were willing to sacrifice untold numbers of lives to build a stronger Russian state.

But Putin also faces headwinds: a still determined Ukrainian resistance, a Western alliance that remains largely united and murmurs of discontent among the Russian public. The question is whether Putin, while he exults in leading a “millennial, eternal Russia,” can avoid the domestic unrest that has also repeatedly been a feature of the country’s history.

“Putin lives in eternity,” said Boris B. Nadezhdin, an anti-war politician who tried to launch a presidential bid to challenge Putin but was excluded from the March vote. He mentioned rulers from the ninth century and added of Mr Putin: “It is clear that he thinks of himself alongside Oleg the Wise, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and perhaps Stalin.”

Mr. Nadezhdin, who has worked for the Russian government and served in parliament, emphasized in a video call this week that Mr. Putin’s grip on power is weaker than it appears at first glance. The security, stability and increased prosperity that were long Putin’s selling points after the chaos of the 1990s are all in decline, Nadezhdin said; “This regime,” he continued, “is historically doomed.”

Even though Putin has worked hard to paint a picture of Russia as an invincible state, he has been repeatedly caught off guard. There was the stunning failure of the Kremlin’s intelligence services two years ago, when Putin expected that Russian troops would be welcomed as liberators and that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government would quickly collapse.

There was the 24-hour uprising that took place last summer, when Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, long seen as a close ally of Putin, brought Russia to the brink of civil war.

And despite a crackdown on dissent, which some analysts say is fiercer than the Soviet Union is at an advanced stage, Russians are still braving arrests to demonstrate their differences.

A group of women have continued to organize small protests, demanding that their mobilized sons and husbands be brought home; in dozens of Russian cities, people laid flowers in memory of Mr. Navalny; and Mr. Nadezhdin was able to submit more than 100,000 signatures last month in his bid to bring an anti-war message to the presidential election.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the Federal Election Commission’s ruling to keep Mr. Nadezhdin off the ballot. It was a sign that, although Putin has allowed liberal candidates to run against him in previous elections as an expression of pluralism, this time he is not taking any chances.

Instead, the Kremlin appears focused on using the presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17, as a spectacle of public approval of Putin’s rule – and his invasion.

This Thursday, Putin will take the stage with his annual State of the Nation address, a televised event in which the president presides over hundreds of top officials and pledges their loyalty to their leader.

Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor close to the Kremlin, said being able to present a landslide election victory as evidence of public support for the war appeared to be Putin’s main goal for the March election.

“The elections – and Vladimir Putin’s high showing in these elections – are intended to electorally legitimize Putin’s policies, including the SVO,” Remchukov said in a telephone interview, using the Russian initials for “special military operation ”, the Kremlin’s term for the war. “For example, if he gets 75 to 80 percent of the votes, it means that people are giving him their approval for this policy.”

By portraying the invasion as having broad public support, the Kremlin can also justify its crackdown on dissent.

Images of masked security officers detaining critics of the war have become commonplace on Russian television. On Tuesday, Russia’s domestic security service, known as the FSB, announced it had arrested a visiting 33-year-old Russian-American woman on suspicion of treason.

Her alleged crime: donating about $50 to a Ukrainian charity. She faces twenty years in prison.

News of that arrest came just four days after the death of Mr. Navalny, who spent more than three years in prison, including about 300 days in solitary “punishment cells.” How Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic prison known as Polar Wolf remains unknown; his spokeswoman said Thursday that authorities said he died of natural causes.

On Thursday, Mr.’s mother said. Navalny said authorities “blackmailed” her into agreeing to a “secret funeral” for her son.

“With Navalny’s death, the Russian regime has surpassed the regime of the late Soviet Union in its brutality and cynicism,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote. He argued that Putin’s rule has changed from “a dictatorship of deceit into a dictatorship of fear, and after the outbreak of war into an outright dictatorship of terror.”

But Putin publicly keeps his distance from the repressive machinery he oversees. Although a spokesman said the president had been informed of Mr Navalny’s death, Mr Putin himself has not commented on it.

Instead, Mr. Putin revealed this week that he was up late the night after Mr. Navalny died, consumed by something else: the war in Ukraine.

During a televised meeting with his Defense Minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, Putin described being informed in real time about the Russian advance in Avdiivka until 4 a.m. last Saturday morning. At 11 a.m., Mr. Shoigu and Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s General Staff, returned to again brief the Russian leader on Ukraine’s hasty withdrawal from the strategically important city, Mr. Putin said.

Mr Shoigu said the military had carried out the president’s order to set up loudspeakers on the southern Ukrainian front to persuade soldiers to surrender. The message was aimed at showing Mr Putin as a tireless leader, in tune with all the details of the war.

At the meeting, Mr. Putin dismissed White House concerns about possible Russian plans to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit this year. Instead, he said, it was Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons, intended for Earth-bound targets, that “they should really be afraid of.”

On Thursday, Putin took a further step to remind the world of Russia’s arsenal by making a 30-minute flight in a nuclear-capable bomber. But when asked hours later about Mr. Biden’s “crazy SOB” comments that the Kremlin spokesman had previously condemned, Mr. Putin turned playful. – a reminder of the former KGB agent’s fixation on sowing confusion.

Using a nickname for Vladimir, Mr. Putin said of Mr. Biden: “He cannot say, ‘Volodya, good boy.’”