Russian President Vladmir Putin’s war with Ukraine has produced big favorable polling numbers in Russia. But Kremlin insiders are worried about the war and it’s longterm impact on Russia, Bloomberg News reports.
And Putin? His mind is made up to continue the war and his hold on power remains secure.
Almost eight weeks after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, with military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation, a small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning his decision to go to war.
The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business. They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years, according to ten people with direct knowledge of the situation. All spoke on condition of anonymity, too fearful of retribution to comment publicly.
And:
Some said they increasingly share the fear voiced by U.S. intelligence officials that Putin could turn to a limited use of nuclear weapons if faced with failure in a campaign he views as his historic mission.
Still, more and more top insiders have come to believe that Putin’s commitment to continue the invasion will doom Russia to years of isolation and heightened tension that will leave its economy crippled, its security compromised and its global influence gutted. A few business tycoons have made veiled statements questioning the Kremlin’s strategy, but many powerful players are too fearful of the widening crackdown on dissent to voice their concerns in public.
Meanwhile, Putin is making a big push to win over Russian youth. A former Kremlin official has said that Putin won’t end the war until Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky is out of power.
It is against this dropback of giant Putin failures that we must understand the Battle for Donbas. That the Kremlin has now explicitly changed the focus of their war to be "defense of Donbas" signals a major defeat in the overall war. 9/
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) April 20, 2022
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.