"The Lord's love for people is not in that he fulfills all our asks and wishes, but in that he lets us pray for him, for us and for the hope for the best. It is this hope, and sometimes the anticipation of a miracle, that lightens our life path and supports us in the toughest of times. Merry Christmas!" Putin said in a televised address following a church service.
In the previous two years, as well as in 2012, the Russian president delivered Orthodox Christmas public greetings from the Transfiguration Cathedral in St. Petersburg, where he had been baptised as an infant.
Putin has already visited the Lipno Saint Nicholas Church in September 2016 together with Dmitry Medvedev, who back then served as Russia's prime minister.
