Is Putin the Chamberlain of our time?
Gilbert Doctorow notes Putin’s ineffectiveness as a war leader:
My closing words sum up my appraisal of the current situation: “if President Putin does not act now, then Russia will lose the war.”
The latest Ukrainian mass drone attacks on Russia last night, with more than 1,000 drones across the country and more than 90 in the Moscow region, hitting targets in residential areas and killing civilians, means that Russia no longer has a home front. The whole of European Russia is now a war zone. It is high time for President Putin to stop speechifying about how Russians should work more effectively to raise the GDP, to stop celebrating Russia’s heroes on the battlefield and to do something serious to end the war in a victory right now.
As I say here, given his lawyer’s pedantry, Putin should take a vote in Duma, declare war on Ukraine and then bomb the hell out of Kiev and all the other decision-making centers in Ukraine. If he kills Zelensky and others in the junta now ruling Ukraine, then the European project of a war against Russia in 2029 will collapse like a deck of cards. The European war mongers are counting on Ukrainians to lead the fight and when they are removed from the game, the bravado will be punctured and European leaders will have to sit down and talk with the country to the East that presently has the wherewithal to level the Continent if it so wishes at any time.
If Putin fails to rise to the challenge, then we may well expect a European wide war that will quickly turn nuclear.