When Russia’s top military commanders announced in a television appearance that they were withdrawing troops from the key southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, what was missing from the room was President Vladimir Putin.

As Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s commander-in-chief in Ukraine, rigorously recited the reasons for the withdrawal in front of television cameras on Nov. 9, Putin was visiting a neurological hospital in Moscow, watching a doctor perform an operation to the brain.

Later that day, Putin spoke at another event, but perhaps did not mention the Kherson retreat the most humiliating From Russia in Ukraine. In the days that followed, she did not publicly comment on the matter.

Putin’s silence comes as Russia grapples with mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have outsourced the delivery of bad news to others, a tactic he has used during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kherson was the only regional capital Moscow’s forces had taken in Ukraine, which fell to the Russians in the first days of the invasion. Russia occupied the city and most of the outlying region for months, a key gateway to the Crimean peninsula.

Moscow illegally annexed the Kherson region into its territories, along with three other Ukrainian provinces, earlier this year. In September, Putin personally staged a pompous ceremony in the Kremlin to formalize the moves, proclaiming that “people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia become our citizens forever.”

However, just over a month later, Russia’s tricolor flags fell on government buildings in Kherson, replaced by the blue and yellow flags of Ukraine.

The Russian Army reported that it had completed its withdrawal from that city and its environs to the east bank of the Dnieper River on 11 November. Since, Putin has not mentioned the withdrawal in any of his public appearances.

The Russian leader “continues to live by the old logic: this is not a war, this is a special operation, the main decisions are made by a narrow circle of ‘professionals’, while the president keeps his distance,” wrote l political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya. in a recent comment.

Putin, who at the time was said to personally oversee the military campaign in Ukraine and issue battlefield orders to generals, seemed focused on everything but war this week.

He discussed bankruptcy proceedings and problems in the auto industry with government officials, spoke to a Siberian governor about increased investment in his region, had phone calls with various world leaders and met with the new president of Russia’s Academy of Sciences .

On Tuesday, Putin chaired a video meeting on World War II memorials. That was the day he was supposed to speak at the G20 G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, but he not only opted not to attend, he didn’t even videoconference or send a pre-recorded speech. .

The WWII memorial meeting was the only one in recent days where some Ukrainian cities were mentioned, but not Kherson. After the meeting, Putin signed decrees granting the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol the title of City of Military Glory, while Lugansk was awarded the City of Labor for Merit.

defeats and speeches

Independent political analyst Dimitri Oreshkin has attributed Putin’s silence to the fact that he has built a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union, in which a leader – or “vozhd” in Russian, the term used to describe Josef Stalin – is by definition incapable of making mistakes.

“The Putin-Putin system…is built in such a way that all defeats are blamed on someone else: enemies, traitors, a backstab, global Russophobia…anything, really,” Oreshkin said. “So if he lost somewhere, first, it’s fake, and second…it wasn’t him.”

Some of the Russian president’s supporters questioned such a clear departure from what even pro-Kremlin circles considered a critical development of the war.

That Putin had phone calls with the leaders of Armenia and the Central African Republic at the time of the Kherson withdrawal was more concerning than the “tragedy of Kherson itself,” wrote pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov in a post on Facebook.

“At first I didn’t even believe the news, it was so unbelievable,” Markov added, describing Putin’s behavior as a “demonstration of total withdrawal”.

Others have tried to put a positive spin on the withdrawal and mix Putin in it. Pro-Kremlin TV presenter Dimitri Kiselev said in his top Sunday evening news that the rationale behind the Kherson withdrawal was to “save the people”.

According to Kiselev, who spoke in front of a large photo of Putin looking concerned and with a caption that read “To save the people”, it was the same logic the president uses: “to save the people, and under specific circumstances, at all the people”.

That’s how even some ordinary Russians might see the pullback, analysts say.

“Given the growing number of people who want peace talks, even among Putin supporters, any such move is being taken in good stride or even as a sign of a possible lesson: labor savings, the possibility of peace,” he said. said Andrei Kolesnikov, a fellow at the Carnegie Foundation.

For Russia’s hawks, outspoken Kremlin supporters who called for drastic measures on the battlefield and who weren’t thrilled with the withdrawal from Kherson, there are regular missile barrages against the Ukrainian power grid, said analyst Oreshkin.

Moscow launched one on Tuesday. With hundreds of missiles and drones fired at targets across Ukraine, it was the largest attack ever against the country’s power grid and left millions in the dark.

Oreshkin believes that these types of attacks do not inflict much damage on the Ukrainian military and do not change the battlefield much.

“But you need to create an image of a victorious ‘vozhd’. Then you need to carry out some kind of coup and shout loudly. That’s what they are doing now, in my opinion,” he said.

Source: Associated Press

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