Politic?: Those Damn Audacious Ukrainians! Mocking Putin

Fire on the Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea following an explosion on Saturday morning. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

"Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. "
"The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode."
David Arakhamia, head, Servant of the People party, Ukraine

"[Russian officials had begun to] prepare their society [for the possible use of nuclear weapons."
"They begin to prepare their society. That’s very dangerous. They are not ready to do it, to use it. But they begin to communicate."
"They don’t know whether they’ll use or not use it. I think it’s dangerous to even speak about it."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

"Right now we are working on logistics to supply more fuel for these generators."
"If [the generators] run out of fuel, after that they will stop, and after that there will be a disaster."
" … There will be a melting of the active core and a release of radioactivity from there."
Petro Kotin, head, state nuclear company Energoatom

People in Kyiv take selfies in front of an artwork depicting the Kerch bridge on fire. Photograph: Reuters

Russia's Vladimir Putin is persona non grata in all Western polite societies whose civilizational norms exclude gratuitous invasions of neighbours and claims of the legitimacy history allows on violent territorial annexations. Russian citizens who heartily approved of their president's grand gesture of absorbing more territory into the Russian Federation, suddenly find themselves potential draftees into a a war they much prefer the regular military to pursue. Oligarchs are discomfitted to see themselves and their overseas investments along with their welcome mat in European capitals suddenly yanked out from under.

Those Russian citizens originally from Ukraine, or who have family living in Ukraine, and human rights defenders in Russia suddenly find themselves wrestling with their conscience over whether it is worth their while to be spending years in incarceration for the unlawful act of criticizing Putin, the Kremlin and the violation of their neighbours' right to exist as a sovereign nation whose culture, territory and values are now under assault - where civilian enclaves are destroyed and millions uprooted while thousands are being killed by Russian troops.

And for robust supporters of Putin's plan to remove the legally, democratically installed government of Ukraine for replacement with yet another Moscow puppet, along with the capture of more geography to enhance Russia's own to more closely resemble the grasp of the Soviet Union, find themselves looking aghast as the battlefield where the Russian military, a well-armed juggernaut is being routed by a much smaller Ukrainian military whose ability to counterattack has been enhanced largely by the acquisition of West-supplied technically advanced weapons of war.

"Putin's authority is being eroded by the military failures in Ukraine -- and there is a very real sense that a loss in Ukraine would fatally undermine his authority."
"Russia under Putin has never before been in a state of acute crisis but now there is a sense of acute crisis because every day, as Russia's position worsens on the battlefield, Putin's position deteriorates."
Sergey Radchenko, Cold War historian, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

"There are increasing cracks in the elite."
"If the army manages to stabilize the front line, then it might take longer, but there will come a point where Putin can neither end the war, nor continue it."
Abbas Gallyamov, former Kremlin speech writer

From allies distrust, from adversaries mockery, from Ukrainians insolence in the face of Vladimir Putin's declaration that Ukraine must accept the reality of its lost territory, and take the moment of the Kremlin's triumph to sue for peace. In response, Ukrainian troops continue to rout the Russian military from their occupation points in Ukraine, pushing them further away with each new victory. Instead of cringing and bowing to the 'inevitable', Ukraine is thwarting Russia's claims of annexation by reclaiming towns and cities in the 'annexed' provinces.

For his 70th birthday gift, Ukraine has managed to infiltrate Crimea to blow up the one bridge critical to Russia's illegal occupation, the sole link from the Russian mainland directly to the Crimea. Another humiliation, eliciting another threat from an enraged Mr. Putin. To his critics, Putin points out that Russia is battling not only the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but the fascists in the West; NATO, the United States, and western Europe. It is really the West that Russia is struggling against, to prevent being sidelined and occupied, the Federation eviscerated.

"Putin is a hostage of the military situation", noted head of the R.Politik political consultancy, Tatiana Stanovaya. "He became much weaker after February 24." And it is that weakened condition,where a neurotic President Putin snarls his warnings from, that if he is stretched to his limits, he will resort to using all means at his disposal to rescue himself and Russia from further setbacks and humiliation. So if he decides to use nuclear weapons it is the West's fault, not his; the West cornered him, they are responsible.

In Russia another kind of storm is brewing where his close elite supporters shocked by the trajectory of Putin's 'special military invasion', even the invasion itself, and the following mobilization, leaving them uncertain and unsettled. Losing Lyman, threatening western regions of Russian-annexed Luhansk province under threat saw two close hardline allies Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeny Prighozin, founder of the Wagner Group, livid with disbelief, both ridiculing top Russian generals, and through them, Putin himself.