In a vain bid to celebrate his illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday congratulated educators on Teachers’ Day, and promised to organize new medical exams and restful autumn holidays for schoolchildren in “restless and even dangerous” areas of Ukraine. But even as he spoke, Russian forces continued to retreat from the territories Putin just claimed as his own.
Putin cites success in annexed regions even as his exhausted troops retreat
“I congratulate school workers in all 89 regions of Russia,” Putin said in his video message, emphasizing his new tally of Russian federal subjects — increased by four with the addition of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine that he is trying to seize.
Putin’s surreal message to the war-torn areas amid cascading Russian military setbacks on the battlefield created a stark split-screen between the image of control that the Kremlin is trying to project and the reality on the front lines, where Russia has been losing ground for weeks. Earlier on Wednesday, the president had signed the legislation to absorb the seized regions into Russia despite his lack of control.
As he spoke, the Russian leader gave no indication that his grip on the regions had already slipped. “Let me emphasize: Russia has been and will be sovereign,” he said, adding: “Above all, it is necessary to convey the moral cultural code of the Russian people to the children and exclude attempts to impose alien and perverted interpretations of history.”
Highlighting the contradiction of Putin’s claim that Russia will remain in the four annexed eastern Ukrainian regions “forever,” and the reality on the ground, however, the president’s spokesman conceded Wednesday that “certain areas” in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were under Kyiv’s control and still need to be retaken by Russia.
“Control will be regained nonetheless over certain territories there, and we will continue to consult with that part of the population expressing the desire to live with Russia,” the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in a conference call with reporters.
The veneer Putin hoped to create of a successful annexation, absorbing four Ukrainian regions back into the “Fatherland,” was shattering amid ongoing criticism of his botched military mobilization aimed at calling up 300,000 new troops and glum, defeated reports of new battlefield losses by hawkish military correspondents with massive online audiences.
“Friends, I know that you expect me to comment on the situation, but I really don’t know what to tell you,” pro-Russian military reporter Roman Saponkov wrote on Telegram about Russian losses along the Dnieper River. “The retreat from the north of the right bank in the Kherson region is a disaster.”
“Vysokopillya, Lyubimovka, Velyka Oleksandrivka, Davydov Grid, these places have been showered with the blood of our soldiers,” Saponkov added, listing key towns in Kherson that the Ukrainian army captured in just the past 48 hours.
Just a month after Russian forces were routed from the northeast Kharkiv region in a lightning offensive, Ukrainian troops have made gains in Donetsk, and are pushing into Luhansk, the region where Russia had its strongest control.
As Moscow acknowledged its defenses in the south had been breached, Russian audiences saw tense exchanges on television as top propagandists struggled to explain why the Russian military is experiencing setback after setback, and to manufacture some optimism.
“We have lost 17 settlements in the Kherson region,” Alexander Sladkov, a war reporter with Russia 1 state channel said on air during one of the main talk shows, “60 Minutes.”
“This is concerning, to say the least. Why there was no cover there?” the host, Olga Skabeeva, responded.
“We are waiting for the reinforcement, it is coming, but if we throw them into battle now, pardon me, what will happen to them?” Sladkov said. “If we mobilized 300,000 people at the beginning of the war, when we had heavy casualties, we would’ve spent them too. Now it’s different, we understand now that a soldier has to be prepared.”
“When will there be positive changes for Russia?” Skabeeva asked.
“If we are talking about big significant offensives, I would say two months,” Sladkov replied.
For fresh manpower, Putin is betting on the tens of thousands of mobilized men to shore up the depleted ranks of units fighting in Ukraine and grant leave to exhausted soldiers, some of whom haven’t been rotated out since the start of the invasion last February.
“In many sectors of the front line, fatigue has sunk in after a long offensive period, during which large territories were liberated,” Alexander Kots, a military correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, wrote Tuesday on his Telegram blog. “But there is no longer any strength left to hold them.”
Western military experts say the Russian leader may be running out of time to turn around his ailing invasion and is facing a difficult choice: spend more time training the reinforcements but risk allowing Ukraine to advance its counteroffensive further, or throw the mobilized men into battle quickly in hopes that they will be able to hold ground despite some having little to no combat experience.
But there was continuing evidence that the mobilization is not going well.
Roman Starovoit, the governor of the Kursk region in western Russia, which is one of the key staging grounds for the invasion, described the state of some military units he recently toured as “awful.”
“I cannot understand how an active training unit of the Ministry of Defense can be in such a condition,” Starovoit said. “A ruined canteen, broken and rusty showers, lack of beds, and the existing ones are broken.”
“There is a lack of uniforms, the parade ground looks as if it had been bombed,” the governor added. “It is good that at least there is equipment and weapons to refresh the skills and improve professionalism.”
Officially, the Russian Defense Ministry has said the newly called-up soldiers will receive “up to one month of training.” But there have been multiple reports of military commissariats deploying soldiers to the front just days after they were summoned.
The problems with the mobilization, which was announced just two weeks ago, snowballed so quickly that more than 20 Russian regional governors resorted to a rare public admission that mistakes had been made and they carried out several public dismissals of enlistment officers.
There have been widespread reports of men unfit to serve being called to duty, including some who are blind, deaf, disabled or elderly.
In a Wednesday speech, Putin blamed the Defense Ministry for not cementing exemptions for students, professionals of key industries, and other people in the call-up regulations.
“Initially, the Ministry of Defense reported that several categories of our citizens did not need to be called up as part of mobilization, but they still did not make the relevant changes to the regulations,” Putin said during a meeting with a group of teachers. “We now have to make appropriate corrections.”
At least nine mobilized soldiers died even before they got to the battlefield, some of heart conditions, further raising questions about how enlistment officers are adhering to health criteria for recruits. Others died under murky circumstances. Local media reported that a young man died Sunday at a training site in Krasnoyarsk after a conflict between him and other men at the site.
Three men from one garrison in the Sverdlovsk region died: one of a heart attack, another who killed himself; and a third who had been sent home, where he succumbed to liver failure linked to excessive alcohol consumption, an official told local news outlet EA News.
These deaths reveal deeper issues in the mobilization efforts, linked to low morale and abysmal conditions in some training centers, where mobilized men sometimes have to sleep on the floor and where the Defense Ministry apparently lacks such basic provisions as socks, food and uniforms.
“Our guys need thermal underwear, warm socks, gloves, cigarettes, sugar, and canned meat,” a message read in one of the groups on Vkontakte, a social media site, organized by mothers and wives of Russian soldiers to crowdsource missing gear.
“My husband has just asked for these combat boots,” Anna, whose husband was recently called up, wrote in a Vkontakte chatroom.
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, and Robyn Dixon contributed to this report.
Source: WP
