PUTIN’S WAR IN UKRAINE

Intro: The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear

Vladimir Putin’s war to subjugate Ukraine is going from bad to worse for the Russian tyrant.

Originally billed as a three-day “special military operation”, it is now in its fifth year, longer than Russia fought in World War One, and longer than the Soviet Union took to repel then defeat Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Nor is there any end in sight as Putin faces yet another summer of setbacks. The Russian military has long ceased to make any territorial gains in Ukraine and the human toil continues to mount.

British intelligence estimates Russian war deaths at half a million. At least another half a million have suffered horrible, life-changing injuries.

Putin is running out of manpower to replace casualties of over a million. His military is being forced to offer enlistment bonuses of up £60,000.

This sounds like a lot of money to most young Russians – until they discover that the average life expectancy of a new recruit once deployed – after training – on certain sections of the frontline is between just 20 and 35 minutes.

Putin is being forced to consider conscription. But that would make an unpopular war even more disliked.

Ukraine has fanned the war’s unpopularity by taking it to Russia’s home front. Increasingly sophisticated, long-range, lethal drone strikes have hit oil refineries, arms factories and other critical infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. They even managed to cripple an oil refinery in Siberia – 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian frontline.

Almost a third of Russia’s oil-refining capacity has been put out of service, some of it for a long time. Fuel depots have also been destroyed. As a result, there are now fuel shortages in more than a dozen regions across the country, even in Moscow (normally shielded from such inconveniences), where bad-tempered drivers are queuing ever longer for fuel.

There are now plans to import gasoline, quite an embarrassment for a country which pumps out 9 million barrels of crude oil a day.

It’s even worse in Crimea, which Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The peninsula is home to a massive Russian military presence, a vital bridgehead supplying Russian forces on the frontline.

But a relentless series of Ukrainian strikes using new, more powerful, semi-autonomous drones on roads, bridges, railways and ferries has effectively isolated Crimea from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

The drones stalk petrol tankers and military vehicles travelling on the main highways in and out of Crimea. Unsurprisingly, freight traffic has collapsed. The ferries have stopped. Fuel is scarce. And blackouts are common. Russia has even had to remove its powerful Black Sea fleet from Crimea to put it out of harm’s way. Quite the humiliation, since Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy.

It’s not clear how much Putin knows about any of this. The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear.

It is populated by a mixture of senior military lackeys and old cronies from his KGB days. Bad news, they have easily worked out, isn’t a career-enhancing move. So they don’t give him any. They even produce a specially sanitised, bespoke version of the news for his delectation.

Stuck in this vortex of disinformation and downright lies, Putin often doesn’t have a clue what’s actually going on.

But even he couldn’t ignore the ominous dark clouds of burning oil over the Moscow sky some days ago, nor the black rain falling across the capital.

Ukrainian drones had struck the city’s main oil refinery again, this time putting it out of action for maybe 18 months and ensuring fuel shortages will remain a daily reality. Another humiliation, given Moscow has some of the best air defences in the world. Putin’s response was to retaliate.

He unleashed more than 70 missiles and almost 500 drones on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least 21 and wounding 85 in the capital alone.

The death toll will rise as rescuers rake through the rubble of some 20 residential blocks. It’s a gruesome business, but Putin is in no mood for peace.

His echo chamber is still telling him he can win – and nobody is within his earshot to gainsay or contradict that.

There are still more than 700,000 Russian troops massed in eastern Ukraine, maintaining deadly pressure on Ukraine’s fortress belt in Donbas which, if it were to fall, would put the whole country in peril.

Certainly, Russia has far more shells to fire than Ukraine and can deploy swathes of missiles and hundreds of guided bombs a day on a scale Ukraine cannot come near matching.

And frontline reports from battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers who are aware of Russia’s suffering and setbacks, are reporting that there is still no sign of its forces collapsing.

Putin is being told all that – and more. But the home front continues to deteriorate. The initial war-driven stimulus is petering out: the economy grew by only one per cent last year, it will be less than that this year.

Unemployment remains very low. But that merely reflects the loss of so many lives on the battlefield and the fact so many other young folk have fled the country to escape military service.

Inflation and interest rates are cripplingly high. The national debt and the annual budget deficit were in fine fettle when the war started. But while the debt is still low, budget deficits are rising fast as defence devours almost 10 per cent of GDP (and half of all state spending). The national wealth fund, which has been pillaged to pay for the war, has run out of liquid assets to finance it.

More than 60 per cent of Russians now think economic conditions are worsening, and 56 per cent believe that the war is hitting their living standards.

Concerns about a deteriorating economy are adding to the growing anti-war mood. Public opinion is clearly souring on Putin’s “special military operation”.

Dictators, of course, don’t have to bother about public opinion – at least not for a while. But there’s always the risk they will do something stupid.  

You might think that a stalemate with no end in sight and an increasingly restless populace would encourage Putin to call for a ceasefire and sue for peace. Donald Trump, after all, has said he can keep all his ill-gotten gains in eastern Ukraine in any peace deal and can look forward to all manner of lucrative Trump-inspired business deals. 

Putin is just as likely, though, to double down and strike elsewhere to deflect attention from Ukraine and rouse Russian patriotism. The Kremlin is already waging extensive cyber and hybrid warfare against the Western democracies, including Britain.

That could be ramped up, creating various crises and confrontations on the way, keeping Ukraine out of the headlines.

More seriously, Putin could threaten Poland or the Baltic states or even Scandinavia, contriving a small-scale incursion to test NATO’s resolve.

The timing would be propitious for him: NATO has never looked more fragile, thanks to Trump’s hostility to the European democracies and his penchant for dictators like Putin.

The Trump administration has already cancelled the deployment of an armoured brigade to Poland and withdrawn an infantry brigade from Romania.

Pete Hegseth, the blowhard US defence secretary whose animosity to Europe knows no bounds, is reviewing what further US troop withdrawals should follow. He wants to move quickly.

Nothing is more likely to embolden Putin to seek a way out of his Ukrainian troubles than a show of weakness on NATO’s flank.

One expert has likened it to “drowning man” syndrome – the desperate measures a struggling swimmer will take to keep afloat, even pushing others under water to stay alive.

Thanks, then, to the resolve and bravery of the Ukrainian people, Putin is that drowning man.

The NATO allies have the resources and determination not to be pushed under by him.

If they stay resolute and united he will eventually sink to the bottom – if only President Trump didn’t keep indicating he’s minded to throw him a lifebelt.