The war has so obviously gone poorly for Russia that Putin didn't even bother to make up good news in his much anticipated Victory Day speech.
In fact, in this largest, fiercest war in Europe since World War II, Putin’s soldiers have not yet captured and secured a single Ukrainian city.
As part of an intense propaganda campaign, which has shut down free Russian media and outlawed any public criticism to a degree not seen since Josef Stalin’s times, Putin has likened Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to Hitler’s Nazis . He did so again in his on Monday, adding, as he has in previous speeches, that he had to invade Ukraine because the West was preparing to invade Russia.However, curiously, Putin did not mention Zelensky—or even Ukraine—by name, noting only that Russian troops were fighting for “the motherland,” so that “no one forgets the lessons of World War II.”
Some had expected that Putin would use the occasion to call for a mass mobilization of all draft-age men, thus escalating the fight from a “special military operation,” as he has called it, to an all-out war against not just Ukraine but its Western backers. But he made no such announcement. He made no false claims of battlefield victories, as some expected he might; but nor did he acknowledge mistakes or announce any shifts in strategy.
It is hard to assess the degree to which Russian citizens support Putin’s war. Given the massive arrests of peaceful protesters, many skeptics or outright opponents of the war are probably hesitant to confide their true views to pollsters. Some hoped that the military would turn against the war, and in fact many soldiers—sent into battle without any preparation or special training—have deserted, abandoning their tanks and weapons, which Ukrainians have captured and gone on to use.
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