Highlights, bold obviously mine:

It was a collossal speech and Q&A that lasted for 5 hours, maybe the most philosophical, intellectual one he's given, the last in a long sequence that goes all the way back to the one he gave at the 2007 Munich security conference when he talked about unipolarity.

The basic theme is that we're going from a system of unipolarity that was set up after the Cold War when the balancing factor, the Soviet Union, disappeared from the scene.

He says that after the USSR dissolved a group of people with great power in the West took control, wanting to impose a unipolar system in which they and they alone would set the rules for everyone else; that these people have an imperialistic, colonialist mindset; they believe they're entitled to shape how every society on the planet progresses. i.e., under the same neoliberal, social, ideological and political model; that this group of people allows no alternative because a successful alternative would threaten the system they've imposed on their own and other societies.

The system he's describing is essentially globalism, which is collapsing; he says there's going to be a decade of enormous crisis as this globalist system finally, completely breaks down and is destroyed.

And the new system that emerges after that will be one where every society, every nation, every culture is equally respected, has a right to its own development - and he's careful to include the West in this, they have their own ideas and cultures to promote, they're not in any way excluded but it will be an equal, balanced system underpinned by international law, with each country working according to its own interests while respecting the interests of the others. So it is an anti-imperialist vision of the future.

He says that Russia does not want to control it, he does not want to see one unipolar system replaced by another one, or to see the current unipolar system replaced with a bipolar or tripolar one, what he envisions is a multipolar system. That's the overall framework of his speech.

You can see how appealing this vision is to people in the global south, to people in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America and East Asia, and how it contrasts with the statement by EU Commissioner Josep Borel about Europe being the garden and the rest of the world being the jungle. But Putin is also creating dividing lines, saying these people are the enemy and the danger, they're creating conflict and chaos trying to impose a kind of globalist tyranny on the world.

Western media did not dig into the speech, they never do, but the NYT and WaPo said it was trying to win over a conservative audience abroad. In fact, it's revolutionary because everyone who isn't part of the unipolar consensus (IOW, Western powers) has an interest in overthrowing this unipolar system that is being imposed on them.

[My guess is that the use of the word conservative was deliberate, another dig at political opponents on the right and the left who, unlike today's liberals, don't like the forever wars the West's hegemonic goals have spawned].

Western media relentlessly claims that Russia is losing the war, that its economy and army are on the brink of collapse, but this speech is not a sign of a president about to crumble or a country about to break apart. In this speech Putin came closer than he ever has before to admitting that he was personally astonished at how successfully the Russian economy weathered the sanctions, that seeing this was a liberating moment because they had been hobbled in the past by worrying about how the West would react to whatever they decided to do. They no longer have to fear that, and this gives them the opportunity to do what they must do and the confidence that they can do it.

A lot of this exchange was with a man named Ivan Timafayev, who is one of the people in charge of the Valdai forum. In the runup to the war, he was one of the most extreme pessimists about the effects of the sanctions, he had expected them to crater the Russian economy but now he effectively admits he was wrong.

On the military front, Putin said that they expected it to be tough in Ukraine, that the West has done everything it could to build up Ukraine for 8 years; obviously there have been problems along the way but we're making progress and are proceeding according to plan - when questioned about Odessa, he actually said, "Look, I know what the plans of the General Staff are but don't expect me to tell you. And BTW, all this talk that Russia is planning to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine is complete nonsense."