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| AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File |
When Russia’s top military brass announced in a televised appearance that they were pulling troops out of the key city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, one man missing from the room was President Vladimir Putin.
As Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s chief commander in Ukraine, stiffly recited the reasons for the retreat in front of the cameras on Nov. 9, Putin was touring a neurological hospital in Moscow, watching a doctor perform brain surgery.
Later that day, Putin spoke at another event but made no mention of the pullout from Kherson -– arguably Russia’s most humiliating withdrawal in Ukraine. In the days that followed, he hasn’t publicly commented on the topic.
Putin’s silence comes as Russia faces mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have delegated the delivery of bad news to others — a tactic he used during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kherson was the only regional capital Moscow’s forces had seized in Ukraine, falling into Russian hands in the first days of the invasion. Russia occupied the city and most of the outlying region, a key gateway to the Crimean Peninsula, for months.
Moscow illegally annexed the Kherson region, along with three other Ukrainian provinces, earlier this year. Putin personally hosted a pomp-filled Kremlin ceremony formalizing the moves in September, proclaiming that “people who live in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia become our citizens forever.”
Just over a month later, however, Russia’s tricolor flags came down over government buildings in Kherson, replaced with the yellow-and-blue banners of Ukraine.--->READ MORE HERE
A presumed Ukrainian air defense missile landed in a village in Poland after the malfunction of its “self-destruct system,” according to a senior Polish official.
“There are many indications that one of the [Ukrainian] missiles used to shoot down a Russian missile missed the target,” Polish presidential adviser Jakub Kumoch said Thursday. “Its self-destruct system did not work, and this missile unfortunately led to a tragedy.”
The incident left two Polish citizens dead and set world leaders on edge as the initial reports of a Russian missile strike in Poland raised the specter of a new standoff between Moscow and NATO, which has armed Ukraine but tried to avoid direct involvement in the war. The explosion sparked a dispute between Western officials and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who contradicted NATO leaders on Wednesday by insisting that Russia launched the wayward missile, only to acknowledge uncertainty after President Joe Biden and other European leaders downplayed that hypothesis.
"I don't know what happened. We don't know for sure. The world does not know,” Zelensky said Thursday. “But I am sure that it was a Russian missile. I am sure that we fired from air defense systems. But it is impossible to talk about something specific today — that it was the air defense of Ukraine.”
The incident occurred as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a major bombardment of Ukrainian energy infrastructure, a tactic his forces have relied upon as Ukrainian troops continue to retake Ukrainian territory from the invading Russian forces. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to +++++relevant+++++ and related stories:
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