More than two decades into power, Putin’s grip on the Russian people is finally beginning to wane.
The war in Ukraine has opened a trust gap and many Russians, for the first time, feel they cannot trust what their leaders are telling them. Combined with the conscription movement in China, it has become increasingly difficult to bear the costs of this pretentious conquest.
Even loyal Russians are now asking Putin a lot of questions. And the Kremlin is running out of ways to deal with pressure. In the past, scripted appearances and semi-naked step-by-step photo shoots have been able to win back the domestic media. Sometimes they even gave an independent reporter the chance to ask Putin a sensitive question he or he two.
But all recent attempts to make Putin appear a strong and decisive leader have failed so badly, even within Russia, that nine months after the devastating war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has run out of ideas. They even canceled Putin’s big annual press conference for the first time in years.
“Russia, like any other country, wants to live a stable life, not ashamed of the Moscow leader. Before the war, Putin guaranteed us a stable life, but now says that life in Russia will be better in 10 years. But now, with all the brains and talent out of the country and my son dead, I can’t afford to wait another 10 years to have a good life.”
Putin’s solid system is crumbling.
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, an outspoken Kremlin critic, told The Daily Beast that we are already in Putin’s end game. “It will lead to the fall of the regime, but the question is how many more people will die before that happens,” he told the Daily Beast.
“Putin has never played chess, the game of rules, he has played a game of poker,” Kasparov said. “Putin is an absolute evil. After 22 years in power, he lost his mind. But when the war ended, hundreds of thousands of angry soldiers returned home with their weapons, feeling robbed.” When he does, he must understand to the core that he cannot continue to rule Russia.”
Tatiana Yashina, 62, the mother of imprisoned opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said last week was a turning point for Putin’s administration.
“Putin is broken,” she told the Daily Beast.
Plot that could trick Putin into another crushing ambush
Yasina had extra reason to pay attention to Putin’s state of mind, as her son was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison last Friday, but the president has handled the consequences of his unpopular imprisonment. The way is because they told the truth about war. Ukraine — Breaking through to a wider population.
Veteran Kremlin pool reporter Andrei Kolesnikov confronted Putin about Yashin’s “bestial” sentence in a video that went viral. After lying that he didn’t, he lied that he knew nothing about the verdict.”
Putin’s distortions no longer convince domestic audiences.
Hundreds of Russian and foreign independent journalists have left Russia over the past nine months, while some remaining journalists, including BBC journalists, have lost thousands of soldiers and some of the highest number of soldiers. Keep spreading the word about Commander. Major regions of Ukraine.Last week’s BBC Russian language service and local publications Mediazona Confirmed the names of 10,002 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. The actual death toll in Russia “could exceed 20,000, and the total number of irreparable losses could reach 90,000,” the BBC said.
Both independent and Kremlin-administered polls show that Putin has lost support for the war, with less than 30% of the country wanting the war to continue. Moscow-based opposition politician Yulia Galiamina told the Daily Beast newspaper: “Putin could have ruled longer if he hadn’t started this war, but now his lifespan is really over. Galiamina is a victim of police violence and has been arrested many times, but refuses to leave Russia. Instead, she is encouraging more people to stand up to Putin.
Galiamina leads a movement of over 150 Russian women called Soft Power. “Most of our women are mothers and see the problem in terms of the future of Russian children without Putin, who will eventually be free.” Galia Mina and soft power activists is collecting signatures from those opposing Putin’s Russian mobilization. added.
Recent polls show Putin is still supported by about 79% of Russians, but that trust is waning. The number of Russians who believe they are has dropped from 64% in October to 61% in November.
The Kremlin’s attempt to reconstruct Putin’s image as Superman seems to have sparked another avalanche of jokes online.
Putin filmed a location video of Action Man driving across a bomb-damaged bridge to Crimea earlier this month. It was supposed to show that the 70-year-old is still fit and healthy, but online commenters were obsessed with the car he was driving. It’s not the Russian-made Lada he previously advertised, and the driver “breaks down more often than the cheapest foreign brands,” he quipped.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was forced to explain that the Mercedes just happened to be on hand and did not indicate Putin’s preference for cars.
Kremlin TV star catches fire as Russians admit war is aimless
Adding to the damage, his short trip to the internationally recognized Ukrainian territory now annexed by Russia saw three explosions hit a strategic airfield within the homeland in the same week. , one of which was only 150 miles from Moscow. The drone strike made Russia’s air defense system and commander-in-chief look pathetic, even in the domestic media.
Last week, the Kremlin released an image of Putin holding a glass of champagne. Many anecdotes about “drunk Putin”.
The prevailing mood for the Kremlin is becoming very difficult.
“The Kremlin’s cancellation of Putin’s big press conference is a sign. They realize how hopeless their situation is. It failed,” famous Kremlin observer Olga Vyshkova told the Daily Beast. “Without Putin they are finished, so they are still standing by him.
A recent debate among Putin’s critics is whether the catastrophe in Ukraine is one person’s fault or Russian society as a whole.Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a former oligarch. A prisoner from home and now deported to London, he told Radio Liberty last week that while Putin took the whole country with him during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he is now single. suggested. “The 2020 war is purely Putin’s invention. Russian society was shocked on February 23,” he said.
The question is how bad the situation will get.
Kasparov, an ally of Khodorkovsky, now also sees an opportunity for the US to drive a wedge between the president and his senior lieutenants like Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Kremlin Security Council. He says America must explain what would happen if Putin allowed the nuclear button to be pushed. Kasparov said at a meeting of security officials in Moscow last month that he hoped CIA Director William Burns would “whisper something in Patrushev’s ear.”
After years of national admiration, Putin is becoming more and more isolated by the day.
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