Humiliated by lightning Ukrainian gains on the battlefield, Russian President Vladimir Putin faces narrowing options as he seeks to turn the tide in his struggling nearly seven-month-old invasion. Know more:
Humiliated by lightning Ukrainian gains on the battlefield, Russian President Vladimir Putin faces narrowing options as he seeks to turn the tide in his struggling nearly seven-month-old invasion.
“We are moving in only one direction—forward and toward victory,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday during a surprise visit to the strategic city of Izyum, one of dozens of towns and villages that his forces recaptured last week. “We’ve suffered a psychological defeat but the Ukrainians are not going to find it easy going forward,” he said. Reinforcements are bolstering Russian defenses in Kherson and the army is continuing its offensive in the Donbas even though it lost a key supply route after the Ukrainian advances, he said by phone.“There is a war going on, and we have no right to lose it,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Tuesday. “We need a complete mobilization of the country.
But general mobilization likely wouldn’t solve the immediate problem because it would take months to train the new conscripts. And dropping the rhetorical pretext that the war is a “special military operation” would force ordinary Russians, many of whom have been largely isolated from it, to confront the true scale of the conflict.
Some erstwhile critics have come around to back the Kremlin’s line again. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a staunch Putin loyalist who over the weekend decried “mistakes” by the military in the operation, had nothing but praise.