TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When Russia’s top military leaders announced in a televised appearance that they would withdraw troops from the important southern Ukraine city of Kherson, President Vladimir Putin was a man missing from the room.
While Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Sergei Surovikin, the Russian commander-in-chief in Ukraine, stiffly recited to the cameras the reasons for the withdrawal on November 9, Putin was touring a neurological hospital in Moscow, watching a doctor perform brain surgery .
Later that day, Putin spoke at another event but made no mention of the withdrawal from Kherson — arguably Russia’s most humiliating withdrawal from Ukraine. In the days that followed, he has not publicly commented on the subject.
Putin’s silence comes as Russia faces mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have delegated breaking bad news to others — a tactic he used during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kherson was the only regional capital Moscow had taken in Ukraine and fell to Russian hands in the early days of the invasion. Russia occupied the city and most of the remote region, a key gateway to the Crimean peninsula, for months.
Moscow illegally annexed the Kherson region, along with three other Ukrainian provinces, earlier this year. Putin personally hosted a lavish Kremlin ceremony formalizing the moves in September, proclaiming that “people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will forever become our citizens.”
Just over a month later, however, Russia’s tricolor flags fell over government buildings in Kherson, replaced by Ukraine’s yellow-and-blue banners.
The Russian army reported the completion of the withdrawal from Kherson and surrounding areas to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River on 11 November. Since then, Putin has not mentioned the withdrawal in any of his public appearances.
Putin “continues to live by the old logic: this is not a war, it is a special operation, the most important decisions are made by a small circle of ‘professionals’, while the president keeps his distance,” political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya wrote. in a recent comment.
Putin, who was once rumored to have personally overseen the military campaign in Ukraine and issued battlefield orders to generals, seemed preoccupied with everything but the war this week.
He discussed bankruptcy proceedings and auto industry problems with government officials, talked to a Siberian governor about boosting investment in his region, held phone calls with several world leaders, and met with the new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On Tuesday, Putin chaired a video conference on World War II memorials. That was the day he was expected to speak at the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia – but not only did he decide not to attend, he didn’t even participate via videoconference or send a pre-recorded speech.
The World War II memorial gathering was the only one in recent days to mention some Ukrainian cities — but not Kherson. After the meeting, Putin signed decrees granting the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol the title of City of Military Glory, while honoring Luhansk as City of Labor Merit.
Independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin attributed Putin’s silence to the fact that he has built a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union, in which a leader – or “vozhd” in Russian, a term used to describe Josef Stalin – by definition incapable of making mistakes.
“Putin and Putin’s system … is built in such a way that all defeats are attributed to someone else: enemies, traitors, a stab in the back, global Russophobia – basically everything,” Oreshkin said. “So if he lost somewhere, firstly it’s not true, and secondly – it wasn’t him.”
Some Putin supporters question such a clear distancing from what even pro-Kremlin circles viewed as a critical development in the war.
That Putin had phone calls with the leaders of Armenia and the Central African Republic at the time of the withdrawal from Kherson was more disturbing than “the tragedy of Kherson itself,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov said in a Facebook post.
“At first I didn’t even believe the news, it was so unbelievable,” said Markov, who described Putin’s behavior as a “demonstration of total withdrawal”.
Others tried to put a positive spin on the retreat and weave Putin into it. Pro-Kremlin TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev said on his leading news show on Sunday evening that the logic behind the withdrawal from Kherson was “to save people”.
According to Kiselev, speaking in front of a large photo of Putin that seemed preoccupied with a caption reading “To save people,” it was the same logic the president uses — “to save people, and in specific circumstances, every person’.
That’s how some ordinary Russians may see the retreat, analysts say.
“Given the growing number of people who want peace talks, even among Putin’s supporters, such a maneuver is carried out calmly or even as a sign of possible sobering up — saving manpower, the possibility of peace,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.
For the Russian hawks — vocal Kremlin supporters who have called for drastic steps on the battlefield and were unenthusiastic about Kherson’s withdrawal — there are regular barrages of rocket attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, analyst Oreshkin said.
Moscow launched on a Tuesday. With about 100 missiles and drones fired at targets across Ukraine, it was the largest attack to date on the country’s power grid and plunged millions of people into darkness.
Oreshkin believes that such attacks do not cause too much damage to the Ukrainian army and do not change much on the battlefield.
“But it is necessary to create an image of a victorious ‘vozhd.’ So it is necessary to make some kind of strike and shout loudly about it. That’s what they’re doing now, in my opinion,” he said.
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