Russian mercenary boss escalates row with top army brass with image of dead bodies
Andrew Osborn – February 22, 2023
The founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin is seen inside a cockpit of a military Su-24 bomber plane over an unidentified location
LONDON (Reuters) – Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin took a bitter public feud with the top army brass to a new level on Wednesday, publishing a grisly image of dozens of his fighters he said had been killed after being deprived of ammunition.
Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company which is fighting on Moscow’s behalf in Ukraine, has this week repeatedly accused the Russian defence ministry of deliberately starving his fighters of munitions in what he has called a treasonous attempt to destroy Wagner.
The defence ministry, in a statement late on Tuesday, said such allegations were “completely untrue” and complained – without mentioning Prigozhin by name – about attempts to create splits that worked “solely to the benefit of the enemy”.
Undeterred, Prigozhin doubled down on his allegations on Wednesday, taking the unusual step of releasing a picture of dozens of his dead fighters laying prostrate on the icy ground in eastern Ukraine, where Wagner is battling to try to take the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
“This is one of the places where the bodies of those who have died are gathered,” Prigozhin told a prominent Russian military blogger in an interview.
“These are guys who died yesterday because of so-called shell hunger. Mothers, wives and children will get their bodies. There should be five times less (dead). Who is guilty that they died? The guilty ones are those who should have resolved the question of us getting enough ammo.”
In another move likely to infuriate the top army brass, he released a copy of what he said was Wagner’s official request to the defence ministry for ammunition with detailed tallies of shells used, requested and received – though he said he had blanked out sensitive data such as the names of the shells.
“They’re still not giving us ammo. No steps to give us ammo have been taken,” said Prigozhin, saying that Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff, were withholding their signatures from shell approval forms.
Neither man has publicly responded to Prigozhin’s criticism in the past.
Prigozhin, a wealthy catering tycoon and ex-convict, has assumed a more public role since the war started. But he has faced push back from the authorities in recent weeks amid some signs of a move by the Kremlin and defence ministry to curb his growing influence.
On Wednesday, he said he had launched a social media campaign to try to secure the shells and that Wagner had been reduced to begging military warehouses for ammunition, which he said was sometimes successful.
Despite the purported shortage, he said his fighters would keep trying to overrun Ukraine’s Bakhmut.
“Twice as many of us are going to die that’s all, until there are none of us left,” he said.
“And when Wagner are all dead then (Defence Minister) Shoigu and (General) Gerasimov will probably have to pick up a gun.”
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Peter Graff)
‘Putin’s Chef’ Leaks Grisly Corpse Photo in Public Betrayal of Kremlin
Allison Quinn – February 22, 2023
SPUTNIK
If there were ever a time for the Kremlin to worry about an uprising by its most out-of-control private army, now would appear to be it.
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has gone from accusing the Russian military of treason to flooding the internet with gruesome photos of the country’s war dead.
“Who is to blame for them dying? Those who should have resolved the issue of supplying us with sufficient quantities of ammunition are to blame,” Prigozhin said Wednesday in comments to a pro-war Telegram channel, singling out Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. A day earlier, he accused both of trying to “destroy” the Wagner Group by deliberately choking off their ammunition supply.
To drive his point home on Wednesday, he released a photo showing rows upon rows of bloodied and maimed corpses that he said were Wagner fighters killed trying to keep the Kremlin’s grip on Ukraine.
“No steps have been taken to issue ammunition. I am posting a photo below, this is one of the gathering points for the dead. These are guys who died yesterday due to ammunition hunger. There should have been five times less of them,” Prigozhin said.
“Wagner, like a beggar crowd funding, is asking unit commanders to help in some way. We will not leave Bakhmut. We’ll just die twice as much as we already have, until everyone’s gone. And when the Wagernites run out, then most likely Shoigu and Gerasimov will have to take up machine guns,” he said.
While Prigozhin has never been shy about blasting Russia’s top military brass, his outrage is rapidly spreading throughout the ranks of the pro-war military bloggers the Kremlin has relied on to bolster public support for the war.
And it’s threatening to overshadow the “everything is going according to plan and we’re all united” message Putin wants to send ahead of the one-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion, when the Kremlin has only slight territorial gains and a whole generation of young dead men to show for the military conquest.
Even as Putin took to the stage at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium for his pro-war rally Wednesday, Wagner supporters (or bots) flooded the chat of an online livestream of the event with angry messages demanding the military “give ammunition to Wagner!”
Prigozhin–who was known for his role commanding armies of Russian trolls long before he admitted to being the puppetmaster of the mercenary group–was suspected of unleashing the messages. Several pro-Kremlin Telegram channels have also begun conducting polls on who followers would want to see win in the “terrible confrontation”–Shoigu and Gerasimov, or Prigozhin.
Ninety six percent of the more than 15,000 people who responded to one poll on Tuesday voted for Prigozhin.
But anger at the Russian military command has already spread far beyond Prigozhin, and even Wagner.
Igor Bezler, one of the Kremlin’s most well-known proxy commanders from Russia’s first wave of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, called for Shoigu and Gerasimov to be assassinated in an intercepted call with an FSB officer recently, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
“First Shoigu needs to be shot, and then Gerasimov, fuck. And then half of your fucking FSB to be hanged and their asses put on stakes, and then we’ll start to fight,” a man identified as Bezler said in audio of the purported call.
“As long as all these fuckwits are in power … it’s all complete nonsense,” he said, railing against “dumb” Putin and others in power before yelling, “Our leaders are fucking morons!”
Bezler wasn’t the only one to float the idea of putting a “bullet in the head” of the country’s top military brass.
The Wagner-connected Telegram channel Grey Zone on Wednesday shared a missive, apparently referring to unnamed military officials, saying that if they lacked the “honor” to kill themselves for their mistakes, the least they could do is take off their uniforms to stop bringing “shame.”
The average life expectancy of a front-line soldier in eastern Ukraine is around 4 hours, an American fighting in ‘the meat grinder’ says
Chris Panella and Jake Epstein – February 22, 2023
A Ukrainian soldier fires toward Russian positions outside Bakhmut, Ukraine, on November 8.Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
The average life expectancy of a front-line soldier in eastern Ukraine is four hours, a Marine said.
He said fighting was especially deadly in the war-torn city of Bakhmut, dubbed “the meat grinder.”
Ukraine has resisted Russian advances on the city ahead of the war’s anniversary.
The average life expectancy of a front-line soldier in eastern Ukraine is just four hours, a retired US Marine fighting alongside Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region told ABC News.
“It’s been pretty bad on the ground, a lot of casualties. The life expectancy is around four hours on the front line,” Troy Offenbecker, the American fighter, said.
Eastern Ukraine’s war-torn city of Bakhmut has been the site of some of the bloodiest fighting since Russia’s invasion of its neighbor began almost one year ago. The battle for the city, which had a prewar population of about 73,000 people, is the longest-running of the war.
Fighting in Bakhmut is so bad, Offenbecker said, that it’s been dubbed “the meat grinder.” In early January, a senior US military official described combat in and around this town, which appears to have limited strategic significance to both Russia and Ukraine, as “really severe and savage.”
“You’re talking about thousands upon thousands of artillery rounds that have been delivered between both sides,” the official said at the time. “In many cases, you know, you’re looking at, you know, several thousand artillery rounds in a day that are being exchanged.”
Bakhmut has been a major target for Russian offensive forces, which include both its regular military and the notorious Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked mercenary organization. Russia has been under “increasing political pressure” to claim some victories ahead of the anniversary of the invasion, according to a Monday intelligence update from Britain’s Defense Ministry.
“It is likely that Russia will claim that Bakhmut has been captured to align with the anniversary, regardless of the reality on the ground,” the update said.
Bakhmut, which is in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region, has been besieged by Russian forces throughout much of the war. Late last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it had been reduced to “burned ruins.”
Despite a months-long attempt by Russian forces to encircle the city, Ukrainian troops have provided a stiff defense that has prevented the Russians from capturing it. Meanwhile, Western intelligence estimates that Russia may have suffered as many as 200,000 casualties while fighting in Ukraine, including up to 60,000 troops killed.
“They have, in some categories, lost more than half of their military equipment in this war, and more than a million of the brightest and best Russians have left the country,” Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, said earlier this week. “So what is this war bringing the average Russian? Nothing.”
‘It’s hard, but they’re holding on’: On the ground in Ukraine, the war depends on U.S. weapons
Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY – February 22, 2023
On a Ukrainian position on the outskirts of Bakhmut:
The Ukrainian military commander pointed to a small, cellar-door-like opening tucked into the snow-covered hillside and said, “If I say to you ‘run,’ you run into the forest and hide in there.”
“In there” was a shelter in the event of a Russian attack, a normal occurrence here.
The lieutenant colonel is a bearded, barrel-chested and battle-hardened 39-year-old artillery commander. His first name is Oleksandr but “Fury” is his call sign or nickname for sensitive military communications. Like all military personnel spoken to for this story, he did not want last name or the units he commands to be identified.
Fury paused, then added, “You’ll have less than a minute.”
Friday, Feb. 24, marks a grim milestone: one year since Russia invaded Ukraine.
During this time, the U.S. pledged about $113 billion in assistance to Kyiv, more than half in the form of military aid, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Infantry arms and equipment, air defense systems, missiles, helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, radar and communications antennas, satellite imagery, trucks, trailers, coastal patrol boats, the list goes on. The first batch of U.S. Abrams tanks destined for Ukraine are expected to arrive as early as this year. American-made F-16 fighter jets have been on Ukraine’s wish list since the start of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. As of now, the U.S. has not agreed to give them to them.
Amid domestic struggles ranging from spiraling living costs to rising refugee arrivals, polls show Americans are growing less enamored with providing arms to Ukraine.
Yet Ukrainian military officials say U.S. weapons are making all the difference. To show how, a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer and several special forces soldiers guided USA TODAY in mid-February to a secret location on a ridge a few miles outside the frontline town of Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s mineral-rich eastern Donbas region.
“This weapon changed the trajectory of the war for us,” said Fury as he stood on frozen ground near what he regards as one of the Ukrainian military’s most prized possessions: an American-made M777 howitzer, a powerful, towable and easily hidden long-range artillery weapon his unit had named “Sofiyka.” Made of steel and titanium, its hydraulic hoses and pumps enable its artillery turret to slide in and out with relative ease.
Sofiyka was backed against a thicket of trees, its cannon aimed toward Bakhmut.
A few hours earlier, another howitzer operated by Fury’s unit named “Krishna,” located on an adjacent ridge, had been fired on by a Russian shell.
It had not sustained any damages. “It’s a day spent in vain here if you haven’t been fired at,” said Fury, chuckling to himself. As he spoke, there was a deep thud as Krishna sent an explosive payload sailing toward Russian targets in Bakhmut.
A side view of an American-made M777 howitzer artillery weapon, minutes before it fired on Russian positions in Bakhmut, a Ukrainian city in the Donbas region. Photo date: Feb. 11, 2023.
How long can Ukraine and Russia keep fighting?
Russian military manpower and equipment reserves are significantly depleted and it’s unclear if Moscow has enough power to launch a major, sustained new offensive, either timed to the anniversary or in the coming months, according to military analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
An offensive that would, for example, enable Russia to capture and hold new territory, as Ukraine did when it reclaimed dozens of its settlements in Kherson and Kharkiv, in the south and northeast, this past fall, forcing a hasty Russian retreat.
“Ukraine has repelled numerous Russian advances, protected its territorial integrity, effectively used newly acquired weapons’ systems provided by NATO and maintained, maybe even improved, national morale,” said Jeffrey Levine, a former U.S. ambassador to Estonia, a former Soviet republic that shares a border with Russia.
But Ukraine’s military is still preparing for one.
In fact, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that a predicted Russian spring offensive has likely already begun. He has ruled out any peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that would sacrifice Ukrainian territory, saying recently that it would “make us weaker as a state” and Russia “would keep coming back.”
Since the war’s start, Ukrainian civilians have endured innumerable forms of tragedy. Millions have fled abroad or been internally displaced. Russian missile strikes have damaged or destroyed Ukraine’s railways, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools.
In every corner of the country, Ukrainian engineers are engaged in a Sisyphean battle to repair missile-hit energy infrastructure. The United Nations has verified a total of 7,155 civilian deaths during the invasion. More than 50,000 war crimes allegations have been reported to Ukraine’s chief prosecutor’s office, from brutal rapes to inexplicable murders.
But it is in Bakhmut and other places along the 600-mile frontline that Ukraine’s military has endured some of the war’s fiercest and most intense battles. And American weapons have been integral to the fight, according to “Biker,” the call sign of a senior Ukrainian special forces commander whose unit has been using American-made Switchblade 300 drones to attack Russian troops here.
“If you ask me what we need, we need more Switchblades,” he said.
Biker’s call sign is a reference to his fondness for motorcycles.
He has been in the military for most of his life. But immediately before the war, he worked as a close protection bodyguard for wealthy Ukrainian businessmen.
He did not want his first name, age or even rank identified because he commands a unit that he said the “Russians are hunting for.”
One evening northwest of Fury’s position, in an industrial plant that Ukraine’s military is using as a base for elite units to sleep in, Biker explained how the Switchblade 300, which can be carried in a backpack, works.
It launches from a tube. Its small wings and an electric propeller then unfold. It flies to a target monitored via a tablet and special software. Then it dive-bombs kamikaze-like to its prey and detonates an explosive warhead.
A laptop shows a video clip of a Russian soldier targeted by an American-made Switchblade 300 drone, in eastern Ukraine. The video clip is not dated. Photo was taken Feb. 11, 2023.
“It’s one of the most stable and precise weapons we have,” Biker said of the Switchblade, which has been dubbed a “suicide” drone.
Ukraine has been using them since the summer.
“But we don’t have enough of them,” he added, swiveling his head in the direction of a cylindrical container that housed one of the killer drones.
“So we reserve them for ‘special occasions.’”
In May, the U.S. Department of Defense committed to sending 700 Switchblade 300 drones to Ukraine. Biker said for his current mission he had been allotted five.
That morning his unit was doing reconnaissance about a mile away from the point of contact between Ukrainian and Russian troops in Bakmut.
In fact, one of his team’s regular tasks was to provide target coordinates to the American M777 howitzers firing on the town from the ridge.
At the base, Biker played some video clips of his unit’s work using the Switchblade 300 to take out Russian targets. In one, the grainy color footage showed the drone plummeting from sky height before crashing into the chest of Russian soldier in a trench. The Russian soldier appeared to be operating a mortar, a light-weight artillery weapon. The screen saver on Biker’s laptop was emblazoned with the official seal and emblem of the U.S. Department of the Army.
‘It’s like fighting from World War I’
Ukrainian soldiers describe the death and destruction in Bakhmut as “hell,” a place where Russia’s military is using convicts as cannon fodder for incremental gains.
If there’s a sustainable strategy by Moscow, military analysts have been unable to detect it. Britain’s Ministry of Defence has described a Russian capture of Bakhmut as having “limited operational value” and primarily a “political objective.”
However, Bakhmut is an important symbol of Ukrainian resistance, and holding onto it for Ukraine could prevent a Russian advance to the larger eastern cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, British intelligence assessments have concluded.
The city lies in ruins.
Blasts ring out day and night. What trees remain are shredded. Craters from exploded artillery dot the roads. There is no power or water. Bakhmut’s prewar population of 70,000 has shrunk to a few thousand – mostly elderly civilians who refuse to leave, though some families with children have stayed behind.
A local resident walks along a street in Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 10, 2023.
In early February, a Russian missile slammed into a van in Bakhmut carrying humanitarian volunteers, unleashing a massive fireball, and killing Peter Reed, an experienced paramedic and former U.S. Marine.
The Russian attack in Bakhmut has been relentless.
“Some guys in our military are having mental health problems because the Russians have been coming at us every half hour and we just mow them down again and again with machine guns. It’s like fighting from World War I,” said the senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer who accompanied USA TODAY to the hillside position outside Bakhmut occupied by units under Fury’s command.
The officer asked not to be named for security reasons.
In recent days, Zelenskyy has insisted that the “Russian Goliath” will fall this year, comments echoed by Ukraine’s top military intelligence in an exclusive interview.
“Russia has wasted huge amounts of human resources, armaments and materials this past year,” Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, of Ukraine’s defense intelligence, said in Kyiv. “Its economy and production are not able to cover these losses. It’s changed its military chain of command. If its military fails in its aims this spring, it will be out of military tools.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is lobbying U.S. and European allies for more heavy weapons. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has warned the war is increasingly becoming a “battle of logistics” and has said the military alliance should step up its supply of ammunitions to help Ukraine.
In a surprise visit to Kyiv on Feb. 20, U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated a pledge to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Standing alongside Zelenskyy, Biden said “Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now.” Biden said he would send more military aid to Ukraine, including more American howitzers. Yet other prominent voices in the West, such as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, have cautioned that the world risks “sleepwalking” into a wider war with Russia.
‘The Russians hate it. They can’t hear it coming.’
Still, getting an accurate picture of what is happening on the frontlines is difficult. Information is often incomplete. Or classified. Things can change quickly.
Or seem not to at all.
In mid-February, Russian forces appeared to control the main roads to the north, east and south of Bakhmut. The approach to Fury’s ridge position was from the west, down a slender lane that snaked through muddy fields, sparse woodland, down-at-heel villages.
In one village, a young girl, perhaps 10 or 11, in a bright pink jacket and with a big smile beaming across her face, rode her bike down one side of a road she shared with several military vehicles. Her dark hair billowed behind her. Nothing on the girl’s face suggested concern about her proximity to the broken city a short distance away.
A U.S Humvee tactical vehicle produced for the U.S. Army is seen near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, in the Donbas region, on Feb. 11, 2023.
Farther away from Bakhmut, to the west and south, Ukraine’s rear lines were a hive of activity: supply trucks, fuel tankers, old Soviet-style tanks, personnel carriers, armored vehicles of various kinds donated from Australia or the Czech Republic.
Stopped by the side of one road, a sand-colored American Humvee, indicating prior use in Iraq or Afghanistan, was being towed for repair. Many of these vehicles bore the hallmarks of battle. They were shot-up or caked in thick, dried dust and mud.
Scores of exhausted-looking, but good humored, soldiers in full combat gear loitered at gas stations to pick up cigarettes and snacks and make phone calls.
Earlier that day, members of a Ukrainian special forces unit named “Signum” demonstrated how they use an MK-19, a lightweight American-made automatic grenade launcher first developed for use during the Cold War. It can hit targets over a mile away and burn through lightly armored vehicles. It is far quieter than its Russian counterpart.
Special forces soldiers from Ukraine’s “Signum” unit demonstrate the use of an American-made MK-19 grenade launcher in Ukraine’s Donbas region on Feb. 11, 2023.
“The Russians hate it. They can’t hear it coming,” said one of its operators.
His call sign was “Guard.”
“We just love it.”
‘Ears! Cannon!’
Back on the ridge above Bakhmut, Fury is in charge of six of the 142 M777 howitzers that the U.S. Department of Defense has committed to sending to Ukraine.
A number of other countries including the U.K., Denmark, France and Germany have also transferred their own versions of this artillery weapon to Kyiv.
Soviet-era howitzers used by both sides are also firing thousands of shells each day at Ukrainian and Russian positions along the frontline.
After his security briefing in which he instructed a reporter to quickly scramble to the shelter if he deemed it necessary, Fury stood to one side and watched several soldiers as they built a second shelter, aimed at guarding Sofiyka against Russia’s own kamikaze drones, called “Lancet.”
The shelter appeared to be made of wood and a simple camouflage net.
Fury said that as much as he wanted to oblige a visitor by shooting some artillery toward the enemy, that was unlikely to happen unless he received new coordinates for a target.
He asked a subordinate to make coffee.
Several soldiers kept their eyes trained toward the sky.
They were watching for Russian drones.
If they appeared, they would probably look like bright white spots.
Difficult to see in a winter-palette setting of light blue sky and snow.
In the near-distance, a loud metallic thud erupted.
“Krishna,” Fury said, with confidence.
GPS-guided shells used by an American-made M777 howitzer are seen on the ground near the artillery weapon near a frontline position held by Ukraine’s military on Feb. 11, 2023.
It is not uncommon for the M777 to fire 200 shells in one day.
Fury’s unit was the second one in Ukraine to receive the American howitzers, in May, and his six howitzers have collectively fired about 60,000 projectiles, he said.
Its shells are GPS-directed and they have a maximum firing range of about 26 miles.
By midday, Sofiyka had unleashed about 60.
Discarded behind the weapon were several wooden pallet boxes, for shells or other components, stamped with serial numbers and a location: Wausau, Wisconsin.
The next day, Fury planned to send one of his close aides on a 20-hour roundtrip drive to Kyiv to meet volunteers who might have some much-needed spare parts for maintenance. As much as Ukraine needs more foreign weapons, it also needs back-up parts to keep the ones it has in its arsenal going.
Often this means a little creative improvisation.
All of a sudden there was a burst of radio activity coming from the hillside shelter.
The coordinates of a new target in Bakhmut had been called in.
“Ears! (cover them). Cannon! (stand back)” a member of Sofiyka’s gun crew shouted.
The weapon’s hulking frame momentarily convulsed.
This time the metallic sound was deep and sharp, and followed by smoke.
Over the next few minutes more shells were fired.
Each time: “Ears! Cannon!”
Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery at Russian positions near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022.
Down in the shelter, Fury’s deputy, Viktor, call sign “Forsage” – a reference, he said, to a military fighter jet’s maximum speed, achieved through jet-engine thrust; an afterburner. He was hunched over a laptop watching in real-time where the shells had landed.
“Impact,” said Forsage.
He pointed to what looked like Russian soldiers scrambling for cover as a plume of rubble and smoke projected upwards from a dense cluster of houses.
“We hit a building where there is direct-fire contact between their guys and our guys,” he said. “There’s so many more of them than us we’re trying to suppress their infantry fire.”
Forsage gave another order through the radio to Sofiyka’s gun crew: “One more.”
The interior of the shelter was somewhat incongruous to the scene outside.
Woody scents of bark and earth wafted from the beams that spanned the ceiling. Persian-style rugs and blankets covered a few bunks. In the far corner, a wood burning stove had a small sign affixed to it that said it was donated from someone in Sweden named “Lisa J.” The stove emanated a smoky enveloping heat.
It was an inviting space.
But it didn’t seem like it would offer much protection if hit directly.
“Better than nothing,” a solider chimed in.
Another burst of radio activity.
Ukrainian air defenses had shot down a Russian drone that was hovering along the position between Krishna and Sofiyka. It was not clear if it was an armed one.
But the M777s may have been spotted.
A retaliation could be on the way.
“It’s best if you stay put in the shelter for the next 5-10 minutes,” Forsage said.
Then Fury gave a new command.
“No, it’s better if you getting moving away from here right now.”
Opinion: How long will Russians tolerate Putin’s costly war?
Alexander J. Motyl – February 21, 2023
A celebration last August in St. Petersburg ahead of the Day of the Russian National Flag. (Dmitri Lovetsky / Associated Press)
How much punishment will the Russians take?
Close to a thousand Russian soldiers are dying every day in Ukraine. Victory is nowhere in sight, and tens of thousands — or possibly even hundreds of thousands — more will die before the war ends.
The economy is sputtering, living standards are progressively declining, young professionals have either left in droves or are planning to do so, and every passing day reduces Russia’s prospects of modernization and development.
Russian responsibility for the brutal Putin regime and its genocidal war against Ukraine grows with every arrest of a dissident or draft resister at home and with every Ukrainian death abroad. At some point, collective indifference to suffering and mass murder will begin to register on Russian civilians as collective guilt.
Russia has become a rogue state. Most countries that have historically harbored Russians have closed their doors, and Russian language and culture — traditionally sources of great pride for Russians — have been demoted to instruments of imperial oppression, as Putin has weaponized both.
And yet, almost a year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russians continue to support strongman Putin and the war.
Setting aside the immorality of such a stance, let’s consider only what it says about the Russian people’s will to pursue their own survival. Russia is headed for Armageddon, and yet most Russians, instead of sounding the alarm and doing everything possible to save their country and themselves from destruction, are either busy attending Putin’s rallies or are hiding their heads in the sand.
If Russia does in fact collapse, as many experts in Russia and the West expect it to do, Russians will have themselves to blame. Except for recurrent protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they have watched since 1999 as Putin constructed a fascist dictatorship — seizing territory in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and launching a full-scale invasion of the latter in 2022.
Putin made them feel great again. Putin and his propaganda persuaded them that the West was a monster, that Ukrainians were Nazis, that Russians were helpless victims. Two decades of authoritarian rule by a charismatic leader inured them to non-resistance, to self-doubt, to self-delusions. Centuries of a political culture that fostered just these very attitudes didn’t help.
The Russian citizenry became, as many liberal oppositionists in Russia and Ukraine like to say, “zombified” — the living dead. That metaphor has been taken to a horrific extreme as wave after wave of inexperienced Russians who should not be on the front keep attacking even as Ukrainian troops mow them down.
Putin has also terrified Russians, making it clear that any act of public protest will immediately lead to incarceration or worse. In the past year, the secret police has devastated the small bits of civil society — the autonomous social, political and cultural institutions that promote collective action — that had barely survived two decades of Putin’s iron rule.
As one independent Russian journalist has written using a pseudonym, “in Russia there is no heroism left, whether you stay or leave or go to prison or remain free. Everyone is going into 2023 alone, no matter how many people are around.”
The picture is dispiriting, but not entirely hopeless. Thousands of Russians did take to the streets in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Russians have firebombed scores of draft offices. The pseudonymous journalist wrote last month: “Many people continue to do important work. Helping the millions of Ukrainians who have ended up in Russia as a result of the invasion — something that I’m involved in. Or feeding the homeless. Supporting one another. Defending political prisoners and writing letters to them.”
The problem is that, as she says, these tens of thousands of people “have no representation.” And Putin, the career KGB officer, knows full well that preventing a vigorous Russian civil society from emerging is the key to his continued misrule in Russia.
If the only thing that promoted civil societies were democratic political cultures, Russia would be hopeless. But, as the post-Stalin “thaw” and Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika demonstrate, Russians can act collectively and autonomously when repression is reduced and the threat of immediate arrest recedes. And that’s partly because, even today, many Russians continue to harbor views that are critical of Putin and the regime.
Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote two weeks ago: “Notably popular in Russia right now are classic works of literature that contain subtle antiwar messages. The most read book at the beginning of last year was George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ Other books selling well include those about everyday life in 1930s Germany, in which people recognize themselves and their fears.”
Anti-regime collective action will happen in Putin’s Russia only if he goes and a power struggle reduces the regime’s ability to crack down — or if Russia gets a beating in the war. In both cases, the “forces of coercion” will have been weakened and popular protest would become possible. And in both cases, Russia’s defeat in the war would serve to hasten Putin’s exit and would weaken the army and secret police.
Ukraine’s victory would not only be good for Ukraine and the world. It would also be Russia’s salvation.
Alexander J. Motyl, a specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the U.S.S.R., is a professor of political science at Rutgers University.
Putin lashes out at Russian oligarchs with their ‘elite real estate’ and ‘yachts’: ‘They just got robbed in the West’
Chris Morris – February 21, 2023
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has previously had a friendly relationship with the country’s oligarchs, has seemingly changed his mind about the country’s richest citizens.
In his address to Russia’s parliament, Putin took a rancorous tone to the elites, saying the sanctions they have faced since the start of the Ukraine war are the price tag for their Western relationships and labeled them as traitors to the Russian state.
“Instead of creating employment here, this capital was spent buying elite real-estate, yachts,” he said, according to CNBC. “Some came to Russia, but the first wave was spent on consuming Western goods.…The latest events have demonstrated that the West was just a ghost in terms of being a safe haven. Those who saw Russia as just a source of income and were planning to live abroad, they saw that they just got robbed in the West.”
Sanctions by the U.S. and other countries led to $95 billion in losses for oligarchs last year. Putin, though, showed no sympathy for the rich, saying “none of the simple citizens of this country were sorry about those who lost massive bank accounts in the West.”
Sanctions against Russian oligarchs have resulted in several high-profile seizures in the past year, including megayachts worth $300 million and $325 million, but a $500 million boat managed to escape seizure.
Some oligarchs have been increasingly vocal against the Ukraine war, which could have been the root cause of the rift with Putin. Several oligarchs have been found dead since that criticism started, including two last April within 48 hours of each other. In both of those cases, their family was found dead as well.
Every credible analyst of the invasion of Ukraine has been stunned by the scale of the Russian President’s folly—and his failure extends well beyond the battlefield.
By David Remnick – February 19, 2023
Illustration by João Fazenda
On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, ordered the invasion of Ukraine, unleashing the full force of his military on an unthreatening neighbor, and the full force of his propagandists on his own population. He had little doubt about his prospects. For years, he had been regarded in the world press as a singularly cunning strategist; at the same time, he methodically crushed civil society in his country and sidelined any dissenting voices in the Kremlin.
So who was going to stop him on the road to Kyiv? Hadn’t Donald Trump, during his Presidency, exposed and deepened the fissures in the nato alliance? Under Joe Biden, the United States seemed finished with foreign adventures—humiliated by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and distracted by its internal divisions. And what of Ukraine itself? It was a pseudo-nation, hopelessly corrupt and led by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former sitcom actor with an approval rating south of thirty per cent. Putin’s serene presumption was that, within a week, his forces would overrun Kyiv, arrest Zelensky and his advisers, and install a cast of collaborators. Putin was counting on historians to celebrate his rightful restoration of Imperial Russia.
A year later, the ramifications of his delusions are enormous and bloody. We do not know the precise number of dead and wounded, though it is certainly more than a quarter of a million. Unmoved by the losses on his own side, much less on Ukraine’s, Putin has sent his minions to the provinces to scoop up more human material for the meat grinder of his war. And what of his strategic mastery? For years, the Kremlin leadership advertised the modernization of its post-Soviet military, the sophistication of its “asymmetric” fighting doctrine. But every credible analyst of the invasion has been stunned by the scale of Putin’s folly—the miserable planning and poor intelligence, the lack of training and logistics, the lawlessness of his officer corps. His strategy, it turned out, was of the most primitive and criminal variety: the deliberate targeting of civilian structures—schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, power plants, bridges. In Bucha, Kherson, Izyum, and elsewhere, Russian forces and mercenaries have carried out acts of torture, which have been well documented by journalists and human-rights organizations.
In a year’s time, what has Putin achieved? To set the stage for this full-scale invasion—it should be recalled that the first act of aggression came in 2014, when Russian soldiers took Crimea and infiltrated the Donbas––he issued a long, historically perverse manifesto that asserted what he had been telling foreign leaders for years: that there is no such thing as Ukrainian nationhood. But by invading Ukraine, and doing so with such brutality, he has unified Ukrainians in their hatred of Russia and in their resolve to create a future as a free, independent, and European nation.
Russian propagandists (much like the propagandists of the G.O.P.) refer to President Biden as a doddering hack, incapable of making it through a coherent sentence, let alone putting up an effective resistance to the Russian armed forces. Yet, in the past year, Biden has conducted a foreign policy of competence and moral clarity, skillfully balancing strength, diplomacy, and restraint. After having publicly predicted Putin’s intention to invade, Biden won congressional support to send nearly thirty billion dollars in assistance to Ukraine, supplying its armed forces with crucial air-defense systems, mobile multiple-rocket launchers, and, most recently, M1 Abrams tanks. Biden has recognized and advertised the immense stakes of the conflict, but he has taken pains not to provoke a direct conflict with Russia. The Europeans have acted with similar determination. The opposition in Congress to supporting the Ukrainian cause has so far been limited mainly to the right wing of the Republican Party, with an assist from its attendant media outlets.
Putin’s failure extends well beyond the battlefield. He has isolated Russia from much of the world, undermining its reputation, its economy, and its prospects. Hundreds of thousands of Russians—often the best and the brightest in tech, academia, and the arts—have left the country. With Putin’s most compelling political opponent, Alexey Navalny, languishing in a prison camp, and independent media outlets shuttered, it may seem that Putin has secured the bovine indifference of all his subjects. And yet there are signs of disaffection: protests, individual acts of defiance reported on Telegram and other social media. One of the top-selling books of the past year in Russia has been George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Not long after the invasion, police in the city of Ivanovo arrested two people who were handing out free copies on the street. Sales are so high, and the implications so obvious, that Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the foreign ministry, felt compelled to reject the notion that the novel resembles Putin’s rule in any way. “In school, we were drilled that Orwell was describing the horrors of totalitarianism,” she said. “This is one of those global fakes.” Instead, the novel “depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end.”
Although the anniversary of Putin’s invasion is a moment to pay solemn tribute to the dead and to celebrate the astonishing resilience of Ukraine, it cannot be one of heedless overconfidence. This is a war that could go on for a very long time. As Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military, writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Russian armed forces are not wholly incompetent or incapable of learning.” Her article deftly anatomizes Russia’s failures, but also goes into alarming depth about how the military leadership can call on hundreds of thousands of recruits, and better exploit the resources of a vast country to inflict greater pain on Ukraine. Crucially, Putin seems not to care about casualties in his ranks. Just recently, hundreds of his soldiers were, according to a leading Russian officer, killed “like turkeys at a shooting range” in the town of Vuhledar, in eastern Ukraine. Putin responded laconically to the debacle. His 155th Marine Brigade, he said, was “performing as it should.”
One of the many gifts that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have provided in the past year is the example of their valor and their sanity. In the most heroic terms, they have drawn the line against delusion. Putin told Ukraine that it is not a nation. Ukraine has given its response. As Orwell wrote in his novel, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
Published in the print edition of the February 27, 2023, issue, with the headline “Wartime Lies.”
How the Russian economy self-immolated in the year since Putin invaded Ukraine
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian – February 20, 2023
OLGA MALTSEVA – AFP – Getty Images
A year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some cynics lament that the unprecedented economic pressure campaign against Russia has not yet ended the Putin regime. What they’re missing is the transformation that has happened right before our eyes: Russia has become an economic afterthought and a deflated world power.
Coupled with Putin’s own misfires, economic pressure has eroded Russia’s economic might as brave Ukrainian fighters, HIMARS, Leopard tanks, and PATRIOT missiles held off Russian troops on the battlefield. This past year, the Russian economic machine has been impaired as our original research compendium shows. Here are Russia’s most notable economic defeats:
Russia’s permanent loss of 1,000+ global multinational businesses coupled with escalating economic sanctions
The 1,000+ global companies who voluntarily chose to exit Russia in an unprecedented, historic mass exodus in the weeks after February 2022, as we’ve faithfully chronicled and updated to this day, have largely held true to their pledges and have either fully divested or are in the process of fully separating from Russia with no plans to return.
These voluntary business exits of companies with in-country revenues equivalent to 35% of Russia’s GDP that employ 12% of the country’s workforce were coupled with the imposition of enduring international government sanctions unparalleled in their scale and scope, including export controls on sensitive technologies, restrictions on Russian elites and asset seizures, financial sanctions, immobilizing Russia’s central bank assets, and removing key Russian banks from SWIFT, with even more sanctions planned.
Plummeting energy revenues thanks to the G7 oil price cap and Putin’s punctured natural gas gambit
The Russian economy has long been dominated by oil and gas, which accounts for over 50% of the government’s revenue, over 50% of export earnings, and nearly 20% of GDP every year.
In the initial months following the invasion, Putin’s energy earnings soared. Now, according to Deutsche Bank economists, Putin has lost $500 million a day of oil and gas export earnings relative to last year’s highs, rapidly spiraling downward.
The precipitous decline was accelerated by Putin’s own missteps. Putin coldly withheld natural gas shipments from Europe–which previously received 86% of Russian gas sales–in the hopes freezing Europeans would get angry and replace their elected leaders. However, a warmer-than-usual winter and increased global LNG supply mean Putin has now permanently forfeited Russia’s relevance as a key supplier to Europe, with reliance on Russian energy down to 7%–and soon to zero. With limited pipeline infrastructure to pivot to Asia, Putin now makes barely 20% of his previous gas earnings.
However, Russia’s energy collapse is also triggered by savvy international diplomacy. The G7 oil price cap has achieved the once unimaginable balance of keeping Russian oil flowing into global markets while simultaneously cutting into Putin’s profits. Russian oil exports have held amazingly consistent at pre-war levels of ~7 million barrels a day, ensuring global oil market stability, but the value of Russian oil exports has gone from $600 million a day down to $200 million a day as the Urals benchmark crashed to ~$45 a barrel, barely above Russia’s breakeven price of ~$42 per barrel.
Even countries on the sidelines of the price cap scheme, such as India and China, ride the coattails of the G7 buyers cartel to secure Russian supply at deep discounts of up to 30%.
Talent and capital flight
Since last February, millions of Russians have fled the country. The initial exodus of some 500,000 skilled workers in March was compounded by the exodus of at least 700,000 Russians, mostly working-age men fleeing the possibility of conscription, after Putin’s September partial mobilization order. Kazakhstan and Georgia alone each registered at least 200,000 newly fleeing Russians desperate not to fight in Ukraine.
Moreover, the fleeing Russians are desperate to stuff their pockets with cash as they escape Putin’s rule. Remittances to neighboring countries have soared more than tenfold and they rapidly attracted ex-Russian businesses. For example, in Uzbekistan, the Tashkent IT Park has seen year-over-year growth of 223% in revenue and 440% growth in total technology exports.
Meanwhile, offshore havens for wealthy Russians such as the UAE are booming, with one estimate claiming 30% of Russia’s high-net-worth individuals have fled.
Russia will only become increasingly irrelevant as supply chains continue to adapt
Russia has historically been a top commodities supplier to the world economy, with a leading market share across the energy, agriculture, and metals complex. Putin is fast making Russia irrelevant to the world economy as it is always much easier for consumers to replace unreliable commodity suppliers than it is for suppliers to find new markets.
Supply chains are already adapting by developing alternative sourcing that is not subject to Putin’s whims. We have shown how in several crucial metals and energy markets, the combined output of new supply developments to be opened in the next two years can fully and permanently replace Russian output within global supply chains.
Even Russia’s remaining trade partners apparently prefer short-term, opportunistic spot-market purchases of Russian commodities to capitalize on depressed prices rather than investing in long-term contracts or developing new Russian supply.
It appears Russia is well on its way toward its long-held worst fear: becoming a weak economic dependent of China–its source of cheap raw materials.
The Russian economy is being propped up by the Kremlin
The Kremlin has had to prop up the economy with escalating measures, and Kremlin control is increasingly creeping into every corner of the economy with less and less space left for private sector innovation.
These measures have proven costly. Government expenditures rose 30% year-over-year. Russia’s 2022 federal budget has a deficit of 2.3%–unexpectedly exceeding all estimates despite initially high energy profits, drawdowns and transfers of 2.4 trillion rubles from Russia’s dwindling sovereign wealth fund in December, and asset fire sales of 55 billion yuan this month.
Even these measures of last resort have been insufficient. Putin has been forced to raid the coffers of Russian companies in what he calls “revenue mobilization” as energy profits decline, extracting a hefty 1.25 trillion ruble windfall tax from Gazprom’s corporate treasury with more raids scheduled–and forcing a massive 3.1 trillion ruble issuance of local debt down the throats of Russian citizens in the autumn.
More can be done
Although 2023 will exacerbate each of these trends and further batter the Russian economy, there is even more that can be done to grease the skids.
A crackdown on sanctions evasion and smugglers, perhaps through secondary sanctions in the case of Turkey and other chronic offenders, will ensure that bad actors do not feed Putin’s war machine.
Sanctions provisions across technology, financial institutions, and commodity exports can be escalated. Pressure on companies remaining in Russia to fully and immediately exit the country must be maintained. Some $300 billion in frozen foreign exchange reserves could be seized and committed to the reconstruction of Ukraine
Tightening these screws will help improve the chances that before this time next year, Russia will realize it does not need Putin, just as the world has already realized it does not need Russia.
Only then will the Russian economy and people stand a chance of returning to prosperity.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and Senior Associate Dean at Yale School of Management. Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Putin’s Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule
Andrew Katell – February 20, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an Orthodox Easter service in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, April 24, 2022. Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail — ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, Pool, File)Riot police detain demonstrators at a protest in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, effective immediately. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail — ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, File)
Vladimir Putin says he learned from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: “If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”
That lesson, cited in the most recent biography of the Russian president, seems to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.
Stoking his countrymen this month on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that turned around Moscow’s fortunes in World War II, he said: “The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people.”
But so far, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than two-decade-long rule.
HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS
He began the “special military operation” in the name of Ukraine’s demilitarization and “denazification,” seeking to protect ethnic Russians, prevent Kyiv’s NATO membership and to keep it in Russia’s “sphere of influence.” While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they say just the opposite — that it was an illegal and brazen act of aggression against a country with a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.
Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, in which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation. That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached back three centuries, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.
But rectifying history soon hit modern roadblocks.
“Literally everything that he set out to do has gone disastrously wrong,” said British journalist Philip Short, who published his biography, “Putin,” last year.
Despite armed interventions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia, Putin overestimated his military and underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western support. Russian media try to boost his authority with images of a bare-chested Putin riding a horse, shooting at a military firing range and dressing down government officials on TV, but the war has exposed his shortcomings and the weakness of his military, intelligence services and some economic sectors.
Ukrainian forces have liberated more than half the territory Russia seized. The war has killed tens of thousands on both sides, caused widespread destruction, and induced not only Ukraine but Sweden and Finland to seek NATO membership. It has increased the security threat to Russia and scuttled decades of Russia’s integration with the West, bringing international isolation.
Increasingly, Putin seems to be improvising in a conflict much longer and more difficult than he expected. For example, he’s threatened to use nuclear weapons, then backed off. The strategy is familiar from his lifelong passion, judo: “You must be flexible. Sometimes you can give way to others if that is the way leading to victory,” Putin recounted in flattering 2015-17 interviews with American director Oliver Stone.
In Putin’s view, an aggressive West wants to crush Russia. His narrative, along with increasingly repressive measures to stifle domestic dissent, has galvanized patriotic support among many of his countrymen. But it runs up against an inefficient, top-down power structure inherited from the Soviet Union, against the interconnected world’s porous borders, and against the sacrifices Russians are suffering firsthand.
AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER
In interviews with The Associated Press, Short, other analysts and a former Kremlin insider describe the 70-year-old Putin as an erratic, weakened leader, rigid and outdated in his thinking, who overreached and is in denial about the difficulties.
They say he seems concerned about waning, though still strong, domestic public opinion — albeit from unreliable polls. Mostly isolated due to COVID-19 concerns and his personal security, Putin speaks with a small set of advisers, but they appear reluctant to provide honest assessments.
Observers see a long, grinding war that Putin is determined to win, with his way out hard to predict.
“It’s not Putin that rules Russia. It’s circumstances which rule Putin,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Short believes the Kremlin leader “has painted himself into a corner. … He will be looking for ways to push ahead, but I don’t think he’s found them.” Giving up is unlikely, Short said, recalling that “his character was always to double down and fight harder.”
Fiona Hill, who served in the past three U.S. administrations and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes Putin wanted to win quickly in Ukraine, install a new president in Kyiv and force it to join Belarus in a Slavic union with Russia. A successor would run Russia, she said, with Putin elevating himself to lead the larger alliance.
But now, according to Stanovaya, “It feels like there is not any hopes that the conflict can be solved any other way than militarily. And this is scary.”
WHAT’S AHEAD
Analysts see several scenarios for Putin, depending on battlefield developments. The scenarios, not mutually exclusive, range from what could be his biggest nightmare — a coup or uprisings like those he saw as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, in the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 — to winning reelection next year. That would extend what is already the longest rule of any Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.
Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and professor at Free University in Riga, Latvia, said Putin could revise his goals in Ukraine, declaring he achieved them by establishing a land corridor from Russia to Crimea and taking over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Then he could announce, “We punished them. We showed them who is the boss in the house. We have defeated all NATO countries,” Oreshkin added.
But Kyiv has shown no willingness to cede territory, and for Putin to sell this as a victory, Orsehkin believes “he needs to convince himself that he defeated Ukraine. And he understands better than anyone that, in fact, he lost.”
As military setbacks mount, Russians are withdrawing morally and psychologically, and thinking, “Yes, we see that something is wrong in the war, but we do not want to know,” according to Oreshkin.
Such tuning out, along with economic hardships, could blow back on Putin, he said, perhaps this spring, as Russians ask, “You promised victory, so where is it?”
Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said the Russian president doesn’t admit mistakes or defeats, and “desperately needs a victory just to prove the point that he’s a strongman.”
Even some in the military are turning critical, he said.
“When he becomes hated by more than half — and we’re driving in this direction — the chances for a coup, elite coup, military coup, will increase,” Gallyamov said, giving a timeline of 2024 “plus a couple of years.”
Stanovaya and Short believe no uprising is imminent.
“Even if people are suffering, and they can be discontented and angry, there is no way to make it political,” Stanovaya said.
Gallyamov sees a way out for Putin if he can gain recognition of “new territories, plus a declaration of NATO that it stops expansion, for example, or Ukrainian introduction into their constitution of their neutral status … or their declaration that Russian will be the second official language.”
DEATH OR SUCCESSION
Another possibility is Putin dying in office, but CIA Director William Burns is skeptical.
“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July.
Short said Putin has established such tight security controls and rival power centers that he’s more likely to suffer “a totally unanticipated heart attack than to be overthrown by the people around him.”
He and Hill believe Putin will eventually look for a successor. Gallyamov lists “technocrats” such as Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as possibilities. Hill said Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin tapped as president from 2008 to 2012, “seems to be auditioning for that role again.”
For the moment, Putin remains very much in charge. In his authorized 2000 biography, he noted: “There are always a lot of mistakes made in war. … You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory.”
When a reporter asked him in December if his “special military operation” in Ukraine has been taking too long, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about big goals being achieved incrementally: “The hen pecks grain by grain.”
US warns China not to send weapons to Russia for Ukraine war
Lynn Berry – February 19, 2023
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives at Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, Sunday, Feb. 19, 2023. (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Pool Photo via AP)China’s Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Wang Yi speaks at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023. The 59th Munich Security Conference (MSC) is taking place from Feb. 17 to Feb. 19, 2023 at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence suggests China is considering providing arms and ammunition to Russia, an involvement in the Kremlin’s war effort that would be a “serious problem,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
Blinken said the United States long has been concerned that China would provide weapons to Russia. He pointed to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s promise to Russian President Vladimir Putin of a partnership with “no limits” when they met just weeks before Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Since then, ties between the two countries have only grown stronger.
“We’ve been watching this very, very closely. And, for the most part, China has been engaged in providing rhetorical, political, diplomatic support to Russia, but we have information that gives us concern that they are considering providing lethal support to Russia in the war against Ukraine,” Blinken said in an interview that aired Sunday, a day after his meeting at a security conference in Munich with Wang Yi, the Chinese Communist Party’s most senior foreign policy official.
“It was important for me to share very clearly with Wang Yi that this would be a serious problem,” Blinken said.
With Putin determined to show some progress on the battlefield as the war nears the one-year mark, Russian forces have been on the offensive in eastern Ukraine.
“The Ukrainians are holding very strong, the Russians are suffering horrific losses in this effort,” Blinken said. He estimated that Russia has 97% of its ground troops in Ukraine.
The Russians also are eager to capture more territory before Ukraine receives the more advanced weapons recently pledged by the U.S. and its European allies.
“But what Secretary Blinken said is big news to me,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. Graham said the world should “come down hard on China” if it provides lethal weapons to Russia and he advised Chinese leaders not to do anything rash.
“To the Chinese, if you jump on the Putin train now, you’re dumber than dirt,” he said. “It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie. Don’t do this.”
Graham said it would be the “most catastrophic thing that could happen to the U.S.-China relationship. … That would change everything forever.”
Tensions between Washington and Beijing have been heightened in recent weeks after the U.S. shot down what it says was a Chinese spy balloon. China insists it was used mainly for meteorological research and was blown off course.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, also expressed her concern about any effort by the Chinese to arm Russia, saying “that would be a red line.”
Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, said he agreed with the Biden administration’s decision to expose China’s possible readiness to provide some lethal weapons to Russia. He said it may persuade China to hold off.
“And I think coming out and exposing and I would go further and tell them what we think they are attempting to provide, China will pull back likely after that public exposure,” Keane said.
Blinken and Graham were on ABC’s “This Week,” Thomas-Greenfield appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Keane spoke on “Fox News Sunday.”
