The Russian president spent the week trying to show that he was calling the shots as Ukraine’s counter-offensive entered a fierce, gritty stage.
Normally, a public utterance from Russian President Vladimir Putin is either a paean of Panglossian optimism, or an aggrieved lecture on the injustices of modern Russian history. Or both. But on Tuesday, he emerged with a surprising new hymn sheet.
As expected, the Russians are entrenched in their defensive lines. And Putin, alongside his airy admissions of weakness, also confidently pronounced that Moscow was in firm control of the 18 per cent of “Novorossiya” to which it lays claim.He said weapons production was cranking up in Russia, and he even aired the prospect of having another crack at taking Kyiv.
The 16-month-old war hangs in the balance, and there were few clues this week as to when, or even whether, either side would be able to wrest the other’s arm onto the table.Ukraine has been buoyed by the arrival of Western support. It is deploying Leopard and Challenger tanks and NATO-supplied artillery into its attempts to regain territory. And its newly acquired air defence systems are repelling many if not most of Russia’s missiles and drones.
Meanwhile, the prickliest thorn in Putin’s side, Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, was put in his placePrigozhin has publicly sniped at the Kremlin over the conduct of the war for many months. The gripe is that his mercenary forces – who were instrumental in the epic, months-long battle for the now utterly destroyed town of Bakhmut – were being let down by the strategic and logistical incompetence of Russia’s top military brass.
Putin’s most significant move of the week was telegraphed by one of his more amenable puppets, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.Some of these, he said, were “three times more powerful” than the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. The US says there have been no signs of Russia actually preparing to use a nuclear weapon. But many observers of the war say there is a sense of inevitability developing around the nuclear option.
She said there was fighting near the village of Makarivka, towards the southern port of Beriansk, and intense battles in Novodanylivka and Novopokrovsk, towards Mariupol. “The situation here is far more fluid than the triumphant claims of liberation which had come from Kyiv this week,” BBC reporter James Waterhouse said.
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