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Putin is also losing energy leverage over Europe as it veers away from Russian gas and most Russian oil.

In battle, Putin has increasingly had to turn to the mercenaries of the notorious Wagner Group, a private military company that has recruited fighters from prisons and tossed them into combat, with high casualty rates. Still, Russia is making previously unimaginable sacrifices. But others remain close with him, notably Chinese leader Xi Jinping.ĭespite the failure to secure quick victory, Putin’s grip on power remains firm, with protests quashed and most Russians seemingly rallied behind the war effort. president said in 2001 ) and who was chauffeured on a golf cart through the gardens of Versailles Palace by France’s president in 2017, has become a pariah to Western leaders. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” the then U.S. The Russian leader who bewitched George W. Ukrainians argue that in resisting Putin, they’ve also done the world the favor of unmasking him as a cruel and dangerous foe. “No one will say, ‘It is something over there, near Russia.’” “No one will ever confuse Ukraine and Russia (again),” says Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Zelenskyy’s closest advisers.

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He helped us to become a free nation.”Ībroad, too, Ukraine has won hearts and minds, evidenced by the blue-and-yellow flags flying from town halls and the foreign fighters and aid workers risking - and sometimes losing - their lives on Ukrainian battlefields pounded by shellfire into hellscapes hauntingly reminiscent of World War I. Says Olena Sotnyk, a lawyer and former legislator: “Putin did for us something which nobody did. Statues of Russians are also being torn down, street names are being changed and Russian history is being expunged from school textbooks. In what have become daily video addresses to share news from the fronts and boost morale, Zelenskyy sometimes wears black hoodies emblazoned on the front with the words, “I’m Ukrainian.” Many more Ukrainians have joined the president in ditching Russian for Ukrainian as their primary language. Fighting to remain Ukrainian has forced clarity about what exactly that means, sharpening the contours of national identity. Ukraine, independent from the ex-Soviet Union only since 1991, has also grown in war as a nation. Each additional delivery of NATO-standard weapons, the billions of dollars in other Western aid, and pledges to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes” are hard-wiring bonds that, in peacetime, might have taken many more years to build. Instead, the threat of extinction as a free nation is pushing Ukraine into an ever-closer orbit with the European Union, the United States and the wider West - the very outcome Putin wanted to avoid. The invasion plan called for resistant Ukrainian officials to be liquidated, weeded out or flipped into collaborating, according to a British think tank’s study based in part on captured Russian documents.

Putin seemingly believed his forces and secret services would have turned Ukraine into a puppet state by now.

That in itself is a stinging defeat for the Kremlin. Western officials estimate it to be in the many tens of thousands and growing inexorably.īut Ukraine is still here. Of the body count - surely the most important tally, but kept under wraps by both sides - all that can be said with certainty is that it is horrific.

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