the debate reaches the political sphere and Russian television

Nevertheless, the counteroffensive launched a few days ago by the Ukrainian army in Kharkov (and which has literally forced Kremlin troops to flee) could have political consequences for Putin. Yesterday, 84 councilors from all over Russia, including those from 18 districts of Moscow and St. Petersburg, demanded his head.

They did so by signing a public statement (accessible via internet) in which they called for the resignation of the Russian president for having “lost the north”. Days before, the councilors of Smolninskoye, in Saint Petersburg, announced that they would present before the Duma (the lower house of the Russian Parliament) a formal request to accuse Putin of “high treason” for the war, according to The Insider. Their goal, they maintain, is to be able to justify Putin’s actions within the article 93 of the Constitution Russian and push him to a political trial.

[Retirada caótica de Rusia del noreste de Ucrania: deja sus blindados atrás y crecen las críticas a Putin]

If the Kremlin officials have raised their voices against their president, risking ending up in prison, it is due, above all, to the tremendous territorial defeats, thousands of kilometers long, which on Sunday forced the Russian troops to withdraw from key places of northeastern Ukrainelike the city of Izium.

The Russian Ministry of Defense obviously did not speak of withdrawal, but after a few hours of silence said that the withdrawal was due to a “regrouping“planned to strengthen Donetsk. Statements that analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) have compared to the same lie about the “goodwill gesture” that the Kremlin alleged when Russian soldiers withdrew from kyiv to end of March for “strengthen their positions” in the Donbas.

“The inability of leaders to admit their miscalculations in the region and effectively create information conditions is destroying the Russian information space,” the ISW notes.

Weak excuses from the Kremlin

The flimsy pretexts of the Kremlin have provoked an avalanche of criticism, which not only includes regional leaders who have signed the petition. Nor do war veterans, pro-Russian military bloggers and some sectors that previously cheered the official warmongering discourse agree with the Ministry of Defense’s justification.

The clearest example is in the Chechen leader and Putin ally, Ramzan Kadyrok, who assured through Telegram that they had “made mistakes“on the battlefield. Because it’s not just Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive, but the fact that the Russian Army has barely achieved any military battlefield victories since taking control of Lugansk in July.

Segei Axyonov, the leader of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed in 2014, has not been beating around the bush either. “Thank God that the Ministry of Defense has finally started to launch attacks against the Ukrainian infrastructure. Hopefully, once and for all, this will have a firmer character,” he said after Russia began Monday to bombard key infrastructure in retaliation for the Ukrainian reconquest.

Official Kremlin channels have also been forced, in a surprising move, to echo the losses and wear and tear of Russian soldiers. Without going further, Vitaly Gancheva Russian official in the Kharkov region, confessed on Monday in an interview for the news channel Rossiya-24, that Russian troops in the province had been outnumbered “eight times”. He also said that the Ukrainian forces had been reinforced by “Western mercenaries”.

[El líder checheno Kadyrov, de aliado de Putin a crítico: “Hay que explicarle lo que está pasando”]

In a rare display of dissent, former deputy and regular TV guest Boris Nadezhdin told the channel NTVowned by Gazprom, that Russia was at the point of understanding that “it is totally impossible to defeat Ukraine using those resources and those means or colonial war with which Russia intends to wage war.”