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Vladimir Putin’s annexation of four regions in Ukraine is his “most brazen escalation yet” and creates an “existential” threat to the country, a columnist has claimed. Last Friday, the Russian tyrant announced with a great deal of ceremony that four provinces of eastern Ukraine had become part of his dictatorship – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. However, almost at the same time as he spoke, Ukrainian troops were retaking parts of the same regions, meaning that within days of Putin declaring them to be part of Russia, none of them were entirely under the Kremlin’s control. For Spiked columnist Tim Black, Putin’s desperate claims over Ukrainian sovereignty have painted the tyrant into a corner – one for which, possibly, nuclear weapons will be the only escape.
Mr Black wrote: “The annexation of Ukrainian territory may be absurd, but it has real and dangerous implications. Almost overnight, Ukrainian forces liberating Ukraine have been recast as invaders of Russia.
“This, in Moscow’s legalistic terms, permits it to use ‘all means’ in defence of what it now sees as formally Russian territory. And that includes nuclear weapons.”
The possibility of failure in Ukraine is particularly dire for Putin due to the political pressure he is now facing to succeed.
Mr Black said: “Moscow’s decision to incorporate the four regions, with the Ukrainian counteroffensive gaining ground, was driven not by battlefield reality. It was driven by internal pressure from within Russian political circles.
“After the military failures of the past month or so, hawkish Russian nationalists, and even some softer state-media talking heads, have become increasingly and openly critical of the Russian war effort.
“The announcement of a partial mobilisation two weeks ago and now these annexations were, in part, an attempt to appease the Kremlin’s critics.”
However, he wrote, these critics “don’t want gestures and ceremonial spectacles. They want a clear military triumph.”
Russian bloggers from all sides of the political spectrum are taking aim at their dictator as he fails to deliver on what he is still calling a “special military operation”.
They had already recently been irked when Russia released of 215 Azov regiment prisoners in exchange for a personal friend of Putin earlier this month.
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Igor Girkin, one of the most prominent commentators accused the leadership of “treason” and “s—ting on the heads” of its soldiers.
Mr Girkin claimed the decision was “worse than a crime. Worse than a mistake”. Resorting to capslock to display the full force of his upset, he said the decision was “INADMISSIBLE STUPIDITY.”
Another blogger branded the move an “extremely strange and short-sighted decision”. Expert on Russians security services Mark Galeotti said that these grumblings from Russia’s right wing do matter.
He said: “The Igor Girkins of this world are in themselves largely irrelevant – but the fact they are out there, they are speaking and nothing is being done about them shows they are the acceptable voice of the disgruntled angry hawkish insiders. It is clear they have protection. So it is not that they could bring down Putin.
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“But they tell us one of the ways people who could bring down Putin are thinking.”
But by claiming to annex parts of Ukraine to appease these nationalist critics, Putin has created a difficult situation for himself, Mr Black claimed. He explained that as a result of it, if Ukraine is to ultimately win its national freedom, Russia has to lose a part of its own territory – transforming the conflict into a “zero-sum game”.
The columnist said: “It is Putin’s most brazen act of escalation yet, raising the stakes of a conflict to near enough existential levels. A wartime economy, partial mobilisation and now absurd annexations. All this may hearten Putin’s hardline nationalist critics. But it is turning a war he cannot win into one he must not lose.”
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