Russia has more arms and more soldiers. It is spending more than twice as much as Ukraine on the military. It has managed to survive the world’s economic sanctions. It has plenty of energy, compared with Ukraine, which is facing a very cold winter as a result of Russian attacks on critical energy infrastructure. And Russian leader Vladimir Putin has an approval rating of about 85 percent.
Yet, with all of those advantages, Putin seems to be making one error after another. At some point, the Russian people must begin to ask themselves: is this guy really in control of the country?
The first disaster was, of course, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which immediately met with Ukrainian resistance and which quickly suffered from outdated equipment and lapses of judgment. What Putin thought would be a cakewalk turned into a series of embarrassing losses of soldiers and military hardware.
The second disaster came after Ukraine’s counteroffensive in autumn 2022, which pushed Russian troops out of a large swath of occupied territory.
Then came the military coup by the Wagner Group led by erstwhile Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin. The rebellion began in plain sight with Prigozhin making his dissatisfaction abundantly clear in public statements via Telegram. Yet Putin was slow to take the threat seriously up until the moment that Prigozhin’s forces seized some towns in southern Russia and began a march on Moscow.
In March 2024, Moscow suffered a major terrorist attack when Islamic State militants struck the Crocus........