A mysterious drone attack on the Kremlin. A car bomb blast injuring a prominent antiwar opponent invasion of Ukraine. In a single day, four military planes were shot down — within the confines of Russia.
If the Ukrainians and their allies wanted to stun the Russian leadership, the strategy worked.
Never in more than two decades Wladimir Putin, I saw him in such an obvious state of chaos and confusion. Today, Kremlin observers no longer need to read coffee grounds to decipher the leadership’s mysterious pronouncements and spot signs of intrigue—everything is known, thanks Yevgeny Prigozhina confidante of Putin.
The founder of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Photo: Concord press service via Portal
In one of several videos he recently published, Prigozhin named the founder of the mercenary army Wagner group, appeared in a field surrounded by Russians and cursed the Russian military commanddemanded punishment from the Secretary of Defense Sergei Shoigu, and the commander of the armed forces, Valeri Gerasimov. Prigozhin blamed the two both close associates of Putin, whom he accused of neglecting to supply his troops for “tens of thousands of dead and wounded Wagner soldiers”.
Putin has not yet commented on this.
Continuation after advertising
Highranking Kiev officials rub their hands and beam with joy. While the Kremlin is primarily responsible for its own plight, given its blatant corruption and incompetence, Ukrainians have done all they can to undermine morale and deepen divisions among their enemies. A steady stream of drone strikes on military bases, oil refineries, and fuel tanks adds to the sense of dismantling. (Officially, Kiev does not acknowledge that it is attacking targets inside Russia. It’s also difficult to determine whether some of the more mysterious attacks, like the Kremlin raid, were actually carried out by Ukrainian forces.)
Just notice how loud and sustained that is The Ukrainians have announced their plans for a spring counteroffensive (Northern Hemisphere).. Good military strategists tend not to be so open about their intentions.
But the Ukrainians have already acted in this way. For weeks last year they hinted that they would prepare an attack somewhere in the southeast of the country but then launched an impressively successful offensive Kharkiv, In the North. Kiev is doing its best to keep the Russians at bay again.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: Ilya Pitalev/Sputnik/Kremlin/EPA/EFE
Another quote from Prigozhin recalled the earlier catastrophe, when he accused regular army soldiers of “fleeing” from the Bakhmut front in eastern Ukraine and blamed the Russian military leadership for “betrayal of the motherland.” (Meanwhile, Prigozhin himself is being accused of treason after a Post report reveals it He attempted to exchange information with Ukrainian officials earlier in the war (for reasons that remain unclear.) Moscow propagandists can’t even think about the horrific casualties since Putin’s fullscale invasion last year. American analysts recently estimated that 100,000 Russians had died since December alone.
Not surprisingly, Russian leaders are afraid. earlier this month, as the country prepared to celebrate the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi GermanyBeginning in 1945, one authority made a revealing slip. Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of a region near the border with Ukraine, announced that he would cancel the traditional Victory Day Parade because he “did not want to provoke the enemy with a lot of equipment and military personnel in the center of the city”.
Putin’s Victory Day celebration was notable for its muted tone and the presence of a single tank a fact that gave Ukrainians welcome grounds for ridicule.
Continuation after advertising
Russian politicians are increasingly questioning the logic of this war. Senator Liudmila Narusova, widow of Putin’s political mentor Anatoly Sobchak, recently made her concerns public.
“No one has explained what a win should look like,” she said in an interview. “If we think of the originally stated goals of ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarization’, the Ukrainian army should have been completely destroyed by now.” went even further: “Does this mean that we demilitarize NATO?” This goal is unattainable.”
Footage from a video shows a flying object exploding near the Kremlin dome during a suspected Ukrainian attack on Moscow. Photo: Ostorozhno Novosti/Portal
If even Narusova doesn’t understand what Putin’s plan for victory is, nobody else can either.
The confusion at the highest level of the Kremlin increases the chances of success of the Kiev counteroffensive. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a longtime Prigozhin ally, now appears to have broken with CommanderinChief Wagner and has slammed his threats to withdraw from the front. As a result, Russia’s three main forces at Bakhmut the Wagner Group, Kadyrov’s Chechen militias and the regular army are openly fighting each other while Ukrainian troops advance.
Meanwhile, Putin notably failed to explain to the public why his forces had failed to prevent the flight of two drones into the Kremlin and the car bombing of Russian Zakhar Prilepin, one of the main instigators of the war.
Abbas Galliamov, Putin’s former speechwriter, told me the Kremlin was “enormous”.
Continuation after advertising
Of course, none of this is a guarantee that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will be successful. So far, however, Kiev has every reason to congratulate itself on the effectiveness of its psychological warfare against the Putin regime. / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO