A genuine tipping point — so could a cornered Putin now lash out?

Two months ago, my work as a conflict journalist took me to Kharkiv in north-eastern Ukraine. over a million people once called it home – but today it is known as ‘the city of broken windows’.

Now largely deserted, many of its buildings had been pulverised by the relentless Russian bombardment.

In the teeth of Vladimir Putin’s inhumanity, the Ukrainians I spoke to remained optimistic that they would prevail. And yes, their courage was humbling: but even so, few of them perhaps foresaw how swiftly events would unfold around Kharkiv.

over the past few days, a bold and bravura Ukrainian counter-attack has seen the mass surrender of Russian troops throughout the Kharkiv region.

In a Ukrainian lightning-strike, its forces have liberated village after village, reclaiming what President Zelensky says is an astonishing 2,317 sq miles of territory – an area roughly the size of Lincolnshire.

Unfolding just 12 miles from the Russian border, it represents a stunning blow both to Moscow’s prestige and its military planning. So what should we make of Russian troops simply fleeing, leaving behind their Soviet-era military hardware, the evidence that they have been using Iranian- supplied drones, and their charred and abandoned tanks?

And what should we make of reports that so many Russian soldiers have recently been captured – including a large number of officers – that Ukraine is running out of space to hold them? well, some of this may be propaganda. But there is no question that these latest developments in and around Kharkiv are a disaster for Putin. Even his Kremlin lickspittles have been struggling to spin the news into anything positive.

Yesterday, Russia’s military leaders admitted their troops had left three key cities – Balakliya, Izyum and Kupiansk, all in the Kharkiv province.

It was an acknowledgment that would have been unthinkable three months ago, just like the remarkable proclamation by a politician on Russian state-sponsored TV on Monday evening.

Ukraine would never be defeated, declared Boris Nadezhdin, and Putin had been misled by his officials. As such, he continued, peace talks were the only way forward.

ASwith anything spouted from Russia’s slavishly Putinite media, we cannot take Nadezhdin’s comments at face value. It is possible they were a Kremlinapproved ploy to test the waters of public opinion.

Nonetheless, that peace talks are being openly mooted at all in Russia is highly significant. Even the Kremlin’s army of online trolls – typing regime propaganda in chat rooms and forums across the internet – have begun to whisper of withdrawal.

All of this suggests a genuine tipping-point in this torrid conflict. Ensconced in his bunker, Putin must be feeling the pressure. The dictator knows that what limited gains his army has made over the past six months have come at a terrible cost. He could barely have imagined the scale of the losses his troops have suffered.

of the original 200,000strong force mustered by the Kremlin for the invasion in February, the Pentagon has estimated that up to 80,000 have been killed or wounded.

That’s tens of thousands of soldiers sent home in body bags or on stretchers, rather than parading in victory through Kyiv. Now to this grim toll the Russian propaganda machine is having to add desertion and retreat.

The big question, however, is what Putin will do next. None of his options is ideal. His preferred tactic – simply ignoring information that he does not like – will no longer do.

Putin’s second option is to continue to lie, claiming that his withdrawal from the Kharkiv region is a ‘regrouping’ aimed at focusing troops in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine’s east. That might suffice as an excuse – but not for long.

Third, he will do what the Russian military always does when it finds itself in a tight corner – take it out on the civilian population. This was the tactic Putin deployed so devastatingly in Syria, when Russian forces pulverised the city of Aleppo into near oblivion.

The ‘Aleppo- isation’ of Ukrainian cities in the south and east is already well under way. Russian missiles have pounded the infrastructure in Kharkiv so relentlessly that large parts of the remaining civilian population are now without water and electricity.

Putin does not blanch at such brazen war crimes, and there is already a mountain of evidence of mass graves and torture in areas of Ukraine freed from the Russians. I have no doubt that more atrocities will surface in Kharkiv.

President Zelensky has said that given a choice of living under Putin’s boot or not having water and electricity, his people would choose the latter.

of course, Putin retains one final chilling threat: the use of nuclear weapons, whose deployment he has threatened from the start of the conflict.

The white House takes this possibility seriously, noting that every Russian military exercise of an invasion of the Baltic states has involved a nuclear scenario.

But I think it is the least likely course of action. Putin may be a despot, but he is a pragmatic one. He knows that unleashing the first nuclear missiles on the world since 1945 would cross a terrible line. Should he do so, even Germany, so reliant on Russian gas, would refuse to accept it. That would plunge the Russian economy into bankruptcy: a collapse as total as that suffered by the Soviet Union in 1990, a moment that Putin regards as the biggest catastrophe in Russian history.

And even a small ‘tactical battlefield’ nuke would be likely to cause fallout in neighbouring countries, possibly including Poland or the Baltic states, all Nato members.

The alliance would, in that instance, have no choice but to respond militarily, effectively marking the the start of world war Three.

PUTINdoesn’t want Armageddon – and nor do his generals. They, we must hope, would step in if he ever tried to lash out with nuclear weapons.

So let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There have been many false dawns marking the end of this filthy war, and still the fighting rages.

Nonetheless, the past few days have offered us the most heartening news to emerge from the conflict in months.

The liberation of much of Kharkiv is, too, a timely rejoinder to the siren voices of the Corbynista Left, who warned that the west’s decision to arm Ukrainian fighters would only prolong the war and lead to more civilian deaths.

These appeasers have been among us since the first days of the war, urging Ukraine – and us – to surrender.

Thank God we ignored them. Today they look like the fools they are.

÷David Patrikarakos is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd and the author of War In 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict In The Twenty-First Century