Putin's Peril

 

The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes about "the current reality" on the ground in Ukraine, which includes some insights into the eroding position of war criminal Putin:

...Russia keeps feeding the grinder. They resupply their lines around Bakhmut as fast as they lose people, one U.S. official said. But he cautioned that some members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle know that this protracted campaign is folly and that resistance to Putin inside Russia is slowly growing.

“Many of those who supported the special operation yesterday are now in doubt or categorically against what is happening,” [oligarch and Wagner Group war criminal Yevgeniy] Prigozhin noted.

An example of this internal dissent was in evidence on a phone call that was leaked last month, in which two prominent Russians denounced the country’s leaders as “stupid cockroaches” who are “dragging their country downwards” and “destroying its future.” According to Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “rage and despair” are increasingly widespread among the Russian elite.

A startling sign of this ferment was the defection in October of Gleb Karakulov, a member of Putin’s Kremlin palace guard known as the Federal Protective Service, or FSO. “Our president has become a war criminal. It is time to end this war and stop being silent,” Karakulov said after fleeing to Turkey from Kazakhstan, where he had accompanied Putin on a trip. Until he defected, Karakulov had been responsible for Putin’s communications security and had made more than 180 trips with him.

While Putin may have counted on patriotic fervor in the beginning of his "special military operation," stoked by big lie propaganda, the consciousness of a "current reality" that's a bloody mess is seeping into Russian elites, including in the military.  His strategy, following the abject failure to capture Kiev and end the war quickly, has been to wage a war of attrition, though it's becoming obvious that Russia is suffering massive economic and military losses in the bargain.  The growing resistance to paranoid Putin noted in the op/ed reflects a nation that already had endemic problems which have now only been exacerbated by Putin's misbegotten dreams of glory in Ukraine.  His decision to cancel a number of "Victory Day" celebrations is a likely sign that the reality of Russia's losses is sinking in.

We wouldn't be surprised if his fall is coming, perhaps sooner rather than later.

(Photo: Don't forget to look over your shoulder/ Mikhail Svetlov, Getty)