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| Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, |
Even as the Kremlin moved to absorb parts of Ukraine in a sharp escalation of the conflict, the Russian military suffered new defeats that highlighted its deep problems on the battlefield and opened rifts at the top of the Russian government.
The setbacks have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military and added to the tensions surrounding an ill-planned mobilization. They have also fueled fighting among Kremlin insiders and left Russian President Vladimir Putin increasingly cornered.
Here is a look at the latest Russian losses, some of the reasons behind them and the potential consequences.
STRING OF DEFEATS IN THE NORTHEAST, SOUTH
Relying on Western-supplied weapons, Ukraine has followed up on last month’s gains in the northeastern Kharkiv region by pressing deeper into occupied areas and forcing Russian troops to withdraw from the city of Lyman, a key logistical hub.
The Ukrainian army has also unleashed a broad counteroffensive in the south, capturing a string of villages on the western bank of the Dnieper River and advancing toward the city of Kherson.
The Ukrainian gains in the Kherson region followed relentless strikes on the two main crossings over the Dnieper that made them unusable and forced Russian troops on the western bank of the Dnieper to rely exclusively on pontoon crossings, which also have been repeatedly hit by the Ukrainians. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS |
President Vladimir Putin is grappling with the gravest domestic crisis of his 23-year rule: an increasingly public quarrel inside the Russian elite over who is to blame for the battlefield defeats in Ukraine.
Since he was handed the Kremlin top job by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, Putin has built around him a fiercely loyal new elite of former spies, businessmen and technocrats who agreed to resolve all disputes in private.
But the humiliating defeats of a former superpower at the hands of much smaller Ukraine have weakened Putin's authority and stoked a sense of crisis in Moscow not felt since the chaos of the 1990s that he had vowed to extinguish.
"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," said Sergey Radchenko, a historian of the Cold War at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
"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."
Since 1999, Putin has weathered a series of crises from the 2000 sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine and the 2002 hostage crisis in a Moscow theatre to the anti-government protests of 2011-12, but no other situation has been as threatening as potential defeat in Ukraine. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to +++++relevant+++++ and related stories:
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