Long parade of defeats marks 'Victory Day' for Putin
By Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg Opinion
Victory Day on May 9, commemorating the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany in 1945, is still the biggest official holiday in Putin’s Russia and the cornerstone of its ideology. This year, Moscow again celebrated with a military parade in Red Square and a Putin speech in front of the troops; despite what the Russian authorities called a narrowly thwarted Ukrainian drone attack on Putin’s Kremlin residence last week (Ukraine denies involvement).
Yet Russia has rarely been as far removed from any kind of victory as it is today. Putin’s biggest problem is that hardly anyone, apart from his suppressed, docile population, is scared of him anymore.
A year and two months into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military is squarely on the defensive. After setbacks last fall that saw it lose swaths of captured territory in the Kharkiv region in the north and the Kherson region in the south of Ukraine, it spent the winter digging in along the 1,000-kilometer front line, with offensive action limited to an unsuccessful missile strike campaign to ruin Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and head-on attacks on Ukrainian fortifications in the eastern Donbas region. There, the only more or less significant town the invaders managed to take was tiny Soledar. Although pressed severely, Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, Marinka, Avdiivka and Vuhledar are still, to varying degrees, holding on.
Now, pro-war Russians await a Ukrainian counteroffensive with some trepidation. On Telegram, rumors circulate of a plan to launch swarms of first-person view racing drones, bought up by Ukrainians in China, at Russian trenches. Ukrainian troops are massing at multiple points of the overextended front’ a credible threat that suggests they will attempt to cross the broad Dnieper to cut through Russia’s main conquest in this campaign, the land bridge to Crimea. Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Strelkov, a veteran of the 2014 Russian campaign against Ukraine and now a nationalist critic of the Kremlin, has just predicted for the first time in so many words that Russia will lose the war. “Even for a ‘dignified, nonfatal defeat’ (in which the enemies drop their plans to completely break up Russia and liquidate its sovereignty) we’ll have to fight long and hard,” Strelkov wrote on his Telegram channel, read by almost 800,000 subscribers.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-long-parade-of-defeats-marks-victory-day-for-putin/