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23 August 2024

Putin is no longer Russia’s saviourThe president appears as impotent as Boris Yeltsin

Ian Garner

At the start of this month, Kyiv’s exhausted forces seemed at last overwhelmed by their opponents’ superiority in manpower and firepower. But once again, they have defied expectations. The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ mass incursion into Russian territory has unfolded at lightning speed and with unexpected success. More than 1,000 troops now occupy a swathe of the Russian Federation's territory, which Moscow is struggling to recover.

Ukraine has launched occasional smash-and-grab raids on Russia over the last two and a half years, but this attack is on another scale entirely - it is a bona fide invasion. Ukrainians are justifiably cock-a-hoop. Putin's three-day war to conquer their country has resulted in what many commentators have claimed is the first invasion of Russia since the Second World War. The mood in ruling Russian circles could, meanwhile, hardly be bleaker.

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