Less than a month after the Kremlin claimed that Vladimir Putin was the subject of a failed assassination attempt by drones, CNN reported that another “wave of drone strikes” hit Moscow. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attacks, and the true origins remain a mystery, although the attacks hit Putin where it might count most: a wealthy suburb, which is surely going to raise more ire from oligarchs. In fact, Russian billionaires have already been lashing out over this war and referring to Putin as “Satan,” and this won’t help matters.
As well, Putin has been dealing with weekly rounds of mockery from the head of his private army, the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin, and now, Russian State TV talking heads are at odds on whether to keep supporting this war (as they’ve undoubtedly been told to do), but everyone seems to agree that they don’t see the war’s objective. The Daily Beast rounds up the latest conflicting panels by these talking heads, which appears to have come to a head regarding what Russian “victory” would look like. There are no winners here:
The Monday broadcast, too, featured a rare moment of brutal honesty on Russian state television, with one panelist offering up a particularly grim prophecy about Putin’s end game.
“What would victory look like? We can see it by looking at Bakhmut, the city where 70,000 people used to live, with children and kindergartens. It was simply wiped off the face of the earth. Everyone who could escape from there did just that,” former state Duma deputy Boris Nadezhdin said, appearing exasperated.
All of this rhetoric follows shortly after Putin’s sad annual “Victory Day” parade to mark the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. This year, in in the wake of his own troops abandoning tanks in Ukraine, Putin only had one sad little tank for his big parade. Likewise, his troops have been stuck using aged ammo that could potentially “explode in your face” at any given moment. Seems like it’s long past time to hang up those boots that have been on the ground.
A final note: rumors have persisted that the Wagner Group wants overthrow Putin, yet Prigozhin recently went on record to say that it’s not true, although to be fair, he changes his tune so much that it’s hard to keep track.
(Via The Daily Beast, CNN & Business Insider)