Putin desperate for something to ‘celebrate’ on Victory Day
RUSSIAN Victory Day is a national holiday, the equivalent of the West’s VE-DAY. Every May 9, Russians and their former Soviet partners commemorate the immense sacrifices made to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
How then will Putin celebrate this year? It can’t be with setback or defeat.
Attention is turning from the cities of Ukraine eastwards, to the Donbas region.
Since the invasion, Ukraine’s easterly defenders in their lines of trenches have been under near-constant artillery fire.
Their opponents, mostly mobilised civilians from Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, have attacked relentlessly.
In the coming days, dozens of Russian battalion tactical groups, units of 1,000 men who’ve done the fighting and dying up to now, will be pushing south from Kharkiv and north from Mariupol to circle the Ukrainian positions.
I am reliably informed that, up until now, Putin has been bypassing the normal chain of command, which goes some way to explaining the chaos in Ukraine’s
villages, fields and roads that we have witnessed.
The army has somehow wrested back control from Putin. A single hierarchy under General Aleksandr Dvornikov was announced on April 9.
A hard man and a veteran of Syria, he towers over Putin. As he outranks army commanders, his word will be law.
The devil’s pact Dvornikov has agreed is that he will deliver Putin’s victory in time for May 9, providing the Russian leader undertakes not to interfere.
For Ukraine, the next few weeks promise to be costly but decisive.
Dvornikov is likely to throw everything he has at the new objective of achieving a limited triumph in the Donbas region.
This will put the 40,000 Ukrainians
fighting in the east under huge pressure. By Western estimates, Russia has already lost more manpower than paraded on Victory Day in 2021.
If the Dvornikov offensive succeeds, and Russia manages to crawl as far as the Dnipro River, Putin will have a limp, faux victory to trumpet on May 9.