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When Russia’s most sensible army chiefs announced in a televised appearance that they were withdrawing troops from the key southern Ukrainian town of Kherson, one man was absent from the room, President Vladimir Putin.
As Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s commander-in-chief in Ukraine, coolly recited the reasons for the withdrawal in front of the cameras on Nov. 9, Putin visited a neurological hospital in Moscow and watched as a doctor performed brain tests. surgery.
Later in the day, Putin spoke at the event, but made no mention of Kherson’s withdrawal, arguably Russia’s most humiliating withdrawal from Ukraine. In the days that followed, he made no public comment on the issue.
Putin’s silence comes as Russia faces mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have delegated the spread of bad news to others, a tactic he has used during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kherson, the only regional capital Moscow forces had taken in Ukraine, fell to Russia in the early days of the invasion. Russia occupied the city and most of the outlying region, a key gateway to the Crimean peninsula, for months.
Moscow illegally annexed the Kherson region, along with 3 other Ukrainian provinces, earlier this year. Putin personally staged a lavish rite in the Kremlin to formalize the moves in September, proclaiming that “the other people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are our citizens forever. “. “
Just over a month later, however, Russian tricolor flags fell on buildings in Kherson, replaced by yellow and blue Ukrainian flags.
The Russian military said it ended the retreat from Kherson and the surrounding spaces on the east bank of the Dnieper on Nov. 11. Since then, Putin has spoken of the withdrawal in any of his public appearances.
Putin “continues to live the old logic: this is not a war, it is a special operation, important decisions are made through a small circle of ‘professionals,’ while the president helps keep his distance,” wrote political analyst Tatyana. Stanovaya. en a recent comment.
Putin, who once said he would personally oversee the army’s crusade in Ukraine and give orders to generals on the battlefield, this week gave the impression of concentrating on everything but war.
He discussed bankruptcy proceedings and auto industry unrest with government officials, spoke with a Siberian governor about the option of boosting investment in his region, held phone calls with world leaders and met with the new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On Tuesday, Putin chaired a video meeting on World War II memorials. It was the day he was scheduled to speak at the G20 summit in Indonesia, but not only did he not attend, but he did not even participate in the video convention or send a pre-recorded speech.
The World War II memorial assembly was the only one in recent days in which some Ukrainian cities were mentioned, but not Kherson. After the assembly, Putin signed decrees granting the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol the name City of Military Glory, while Luhansk revered as City of Labor Merit.
Independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin attributed Putin’s silence to the fact that he has constructed a political formula close to that of the Soviet Union, in which a leader — or “vozhd” in Russian, a term used to describe Josef Stalin — is by definition incapable of making mistakes.
“The system of Putin and Putin. . . it is constructed in such a way that all defeats are attributed to others: enemies, traitors, backstabbing, global Russophobia, everything, actually,” Oreshkin said. “So if he lost somewhere, first, it’s wrong, and second, it wasn’t him. “
Some of Putin’s supporters distanced themselves so much from what even pro-Kremlin circles saw as a critical progression in the war.
For Putin, having phone calls with the leaders of Armenia and the Central African Republic at the time of Kherson’s withdrawal is more troubling than “the Kherson tragedy itself,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov said in a Facebook post.
“At first I didn’t even hear the news, it was incredible,” Markov said, describing Putin’s habit as a “demonstration of general withdrawal. “
Others have tried to put a positive spin on retirement and integrate Putin into it. Pro-Kremlin TV host Dmitry Kiselev, on his main news program Sunday night, said the logic of Kherson’s withdrawal was “to save the people. “
According to Kiselev, who spoke in front of a giant photo of Putin hunting those involved through a caption that read, “To save the people,” it’s the same logic the president uses: “to save the people, and in express circumstances, each and every person. “
That’s how some Russians might also view retirement, analysts say.
“Given the growing number of other people in need of peace talks, even among Putin supporters, any such maneuver is taken in strides or even as an imaginable sign of sobering job savings, job savings, possibility of peace,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior official member of the Carnegie Endowment.
For Russian hawks, vocal Kremlin supporters who called for drastic measures on the battlefield and were delighted with Kherson’s withdrawal, there is a normal barrage of missile movements in Ukraine’s network of forces, analyst Oreshkin said.
Moscow introduced a Tuesday. With around a hundred missiles and drones fired at targets across Ukraine, it was the largest attack to date on the country’s network of forces and plunged millions into darkness.
Oreshkin believes that such attacks cause too much damage to the Ukrainian army and replace much on the battlefield.
“But it is mandatory to create the symbol of a victorious ‘vozhd’. It is mandatory to hold some kind of strike and shout loudly about them. That’s what they’re doing right now, in my opinion,” he said.
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