Reality catching up with Putin after week that the war turned
With Ukraine retaking lost territory and his elite tank division routed, experts fear Russian president will turn to weapons of mass destruction to save face
‘There is persistent tension between Putin and the ministry of defence, stemming from Putin’s mistrust of the ministry’s leadership’
This week may go down as the one in which Russia started losing its war on Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s forces suffered a series of shocking reverses on the battlefield. For the first time, Ukraine recaptured more territory than it lost every day for an entire week, pushing Russian forces 20 miles back from Kyiv.
Russia’s famed 4th Guards Tank Division, noted for its victories at Stalingrad and Berlin, was routed in a small, little-known Ukrainian town called Trostyanets.
By the end of the week, Ukraine appeared to have taken the war to Russia as Kyiv refused to confirm whether it had ordered a cross-border helicopter raid that left an oil depot burning out of control in the Russian city of Belgorod.
In Moscow, Mr Putin seemed ever more isolated, as Western intelligence officials claimed that he was being told lies by ministers and generals too scared to tell him the truth.
But there were warnings the most dangerous days may lie ahead, as Ukrainian forces waited in First World War-style trenches for a renewed Russian onslaught in the Donbas and Western capitals weighed up the risks of Mr Putin turning to weapons of mass destruction.
The week’s most stunning dispatches came from Trostyanets, a small town of some 20,000 people near Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine.
Pictures taken in the town last weekend showed the tanks of Russia’s 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya division reduced to twisted wrecks.
The 4th Guards is so synonymous with Russian military prowess a Moscow metro station is named after it. It played a key role in two of the most momentous battles in modern history: the great Soviet defence of Stalingrad, which turned back the Nazi advance a cost of more than a million lives, and the Battle of Berlin where the Nazis were finally defeated.
Yet last weekend Ukraine humbled the legendary division in a shocking illustration of how badly the war is going for Russia.
The bad news kept coming for Moscow, as Ukraine pushed its forces 20 miles back from Kyiv.
On Wednesday Ukraine clawed back the devastated remains of the key suburb of Irpin, and on Thursday it recaptured Hostomel airport, which Russia seized at the start of the war, when Moscow believed it could take Kyiv in a matter of days.
It is Ukrainian tanks that are making history now, as the country’s 1st Tank Brigade broke Russia’s siege of Chernihiv in the north on Thursday.
Kyiv looks out of Putin’s reach. Even the much-discussed 40-mile convoy of Russian armour that spent weeks waiting outside the city has dispersed, melted away in the fog of war.
And Russia’s humiliation continued when Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader who has been called “Putin’s attack dog”, was shown to be lying after he claimed he was in Ukraine.
Kadyrov claimed a picture of him praying to Mecca with a heavy machine gun at his side that he posted on social media had been taken outside the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. But the tell-tale logo of a Pulsar petrol station in the background, of which there are none Ukraine, gave him away: the picture had been clearly taken in Russia.
The Kremlin looks in increasing disarray, with senior commanders under house arrest and officials appearing to contradict each other.
Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, finally turned up on Tuesday, ending to speculation over his whereabouts after he disappeared for two weeks.
Looking distinctly greyer than the last time he was seen in public, Gen Shoigu confirmed Russian forces were pulling back from Kyiv and the north to focus on the Donbas.
The move had been announced by Gen Sergei Rudskoi of the general staff last week, but at the time it was contradicted by the Kremlin.
The return of Gen Shoigu appeared to suggest some form of internal struggle over strategy. He was the one member of Mr Putin’s inner circle who appeared to have a personal relationship with the president: the two have been pictured together on hunting and fishing holidays in Siberia. But US intelligence this week claimed that Mr Putin was angry as he believes his defence minister has lied to him about the war.
That view was echoed by British intelligence, which said senior Russian officials were afraid to tell Mr Putin the truth. “We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military.
“There is now persistent tension between Putin and the ministry of defence, stemming from Putin’s mistrust in the ministry of defence leadership,” a source in US intelligence said this week. Declassified intelligence claimed Mr Putin “didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts ... showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information”.
“They are afraid to tell him the truth,” Sir Jeremy Fleming, the head of GCHQ, said this week. But he added: “What’s going on, and the extent of these misjudgments, must be crystal clear to the regime.”
Mr Putin ‘didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts’
Sir Jeremy claimed Russian troops were so demoralised they were refusing to obey orders, sabotaging their own equipment and accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.
Unusual aircraft activity before his appearance at a Moscow rally last week fuelled speculation Mr Putin may be spending most of his time in a nuclear bunker somewhere near the Urals, adding to his isolation.
Senior officials, including Gen Roman Gavrilov, deputy head of the national guard, and Gen Sergei Beseda, head of foreign intelligence in the federal security service, have reportedly been sacked and are under house arrest.
In Ukraine, reports that Russian forces have withdrawn from Kyiv and the north appear to be accurate. They continue to fire on civilian targets, including a cancer hospital in Chernihiv, and Ukrainian officials said the situation remained dangerous, but it is not unusual for armies to fire to cover a retreat.
Attention is shifting to the Donbas, where Russia says it will concentrate its attack. Tens of thousands of battle-hardened Ukrainian troops are preparing to face them in First World
War-style trenches and military experts fear a battle on a single front could be brutal and drag on for three years, or more.
Russia has sustained heavy casualties and is clearly losing the war but Ukraine cannot allow itself to be complacent. The USSR faced similar heavy losses and failed to take control of Finland in the 1939-40 Winter War.
But Finland had to cede territory in Karelia to the Soviets before Stalin would call off his troops. And history has an even starker warning: Stalingrad, where the legend of Russia’s 4th Guards tank division was forged, was the turning point on the Eastern Front of the Second World War, as the Red Army turned back the German advance. But victory came at a harrowing cost. More than 1.1million Soviet troops perished – considerably more than the Germans lost. The Soviets won on the Eastern front in part because Stalin was prepared to accept those huge losses.
As the threat of nuclear escalation continues to hang menacingly, it remains to be seen whether far smaller losses will turn back Mr Putin.