Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

Ukrainian drones now pummel industrial targets across Russia nightly, shutting down oil refineries, snarling logistics, and forcing airports to close for days at a time. More than 1 million Russians have been killed or badly wounded in the war, a toll too great to hide—almost every family has been affected. The gap between what Russians know to be true about the war and what the Kremlin says about it has grown so wide that even warmongers like Dugin struggle to bridge it. Instead, the ideologues of Russian imperialism have turned to random musings and belligerent hate speech, which seems intended to confuse rather than convince.

“It shows that everyone is beyond exhausted,” Mikhail Zygar, the author of several books about the Russian elite, most recently The Dark Side of the Earth, told me. “There is no one left who wants the war to continue, with the possible exception of Putin and Dugin.” A year or two ago, wealthy and powerful Russians tended to support the war, even in their private conversations, because they knew the dangers of losing it. “They would say things like: Yes, maybe it’s bad we started all this, but now we have no choice but to win,” Zygar said. “Nobody says that anymore. Now they just say the war has reached a dead end, and it needs to stop.”
/---/
More than four years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s image-makers have failed at the basic task of explaining the war’s purpose to the Russian public. Putin did not come any closer to that goal during his speech at the forum yesterday. When a moderator asked him about Zelensky’s letter, Putin said that it contained “elements of rudeness.” He turned down the offer to negotiate a deal to end the war, appealing to Russia’s soldiers to continue fighting because, as he put it, “the whole country is watching you.”

But the consequences of the war, at least in terms of Russia’s isolation, are impossible for Putin to hide. Before the 2022 invasion, the St. Petersburg forum often attracted the leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, including China, France, Germany, India, and Japan. This year, Putin shared the stage with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Tanzania, the only heads of state who’d deigned to come. It was not the image of power and influence Russia wanted to project. But in the fifth year of his forever war, it seems to be the best that Putin can do.