As Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Sergei Surovykin, Russia’s top commander in Ukraine, harshly recounted the reasons for the retreat in front of cameras on Nov. 9, Putin toured a neurological hospital in Moscow, watching a doctor perform brain surgery . Later that day, Putin spoke at another event but made no mention of the withdrawal from Kherson — arguably Russia’s most humiliating withdrawal in Ukraine. In the days that followed, he did not comment publicly on the matter. Putin’s silence comes as Russia faces mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have outsourced the delivery of bad news to others – a tactic he used during the coronavirus pandemic. Kherson was the only regional capital captured by Moscow’s forces in Ukraine, falling to the Russians in the first days of the invasion. Russia has occupied the city and most of the outlying region, a key gateway to the Crimean peninsula, for months. Moscow illegally annexed the Kherson region, along with three other Ukrainian provinces, earlier this year. Putin personally hosted a lavish ceremony in the Kremlin to formalize the moves in September, declaring that “people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia become our citizens forever.” A little more than a month later, however, Russia’s tricolor flags came down over government buildings in Kherson, replaced by Ukraine’s yellow-and-blue banners. The Russian military said it completed its withdrawal from Kherson and surrounding areas on the east bank of the Dnieper River on November 11. Since then, Putin has not mentioned the retreat in any of his public appearances. Putin “continues to live by the old logic: This is not a war, this is a special operation, the main decisions are made by a small circle of ‘professionals’, while the president keeps his distance,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote. in a recent comment. Putin, who was once rumored to be personally overseeing the military campaign in Ukraine and issuing battlefield orders to generals, appeared this week to be focused on everything but the war. He discussed bankruptcy proceedings and the auto industry’s problems with government officials, spoke with a governor of Siberia about boosting investment in his region, had phone calls with various world leaders and met with the new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. On Tuesday, Putin chaired a video conference on World War II memorials. This was the day he was expected to speak at the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia — but not only did he decide not to attend, he didn’t even join it via video conference or send a pre-recorded speech. The World War II memorial meeting was the only one in recent days in which some Ukrainian cities — but not Kherson — were mentioned. After the meeting, Putin signed decrees awarding the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol the title of City of Military Glory, while Luhansk was honored as the City of Labor. Independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin attributed Putin’s silence to the fact that he has built a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union, in which a leader – or “vozhd” in Russian, a term used to describe Joseph Stalin – is by definition he is not good at making mistakes. “Putin and Putin’s system … is built in such a way that all defeats are blamed on someone else: enemies, traitors, backstabbing, global Russophobia – anything, really,” Oreshkin said. “Well, if he missed somewhere, firstly, it’s untrue, and secondly – it wasn’t him.” Some of Putin’s supporters questioned such apparent distancing from what even pro-Kremlin circles saw as critical developments in the war. For Putin to have phone calls with the leaders of Armenia and the Central African Republic at the time of the Kherson retreat was more troubling than “the Kherson tragedy itself,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov said in a Facebook post. “At first, I didn’t even believe the news, it was so unbelievable,” Markov said, describing Putin’s behavior as “evidence of total withdrawal.” Others tried to put a positive spin on the retreat and bring Putin into it. Pro-Kremlin TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev, on his flagship news show on Sunday night, said the rationale behind the withdrawal from Kherson was “to save people”. According to Kiselev, who spoke in front of a large photo of Putin looking preoccupied with a caption that read: “To save people,” it was the same logic the president uses — “to save people, and in certain circumstances , every person”. That’s how some ordinary Russians can also see the retreat, analysts say. “Given the growing number of people who want peace talks, even among Putin’s supporters, any such maneuver is met with coolness or even as a sign of a possible awakening — saving manpower, the possibility of peace,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior official. fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. For Russia hawks — the Kremlin’s vocal backers who have called for drastic steps on the battlefield and were not thrilled with the Kherson retreat — there are regular barrages of missile strikes on Ukraine’s power grid, analyst Oreshkin said. Moscow started on a Tuesday. With around 100 missiles and drones fired at targets across Ukraine, it was the largest attack to date on the country’s power grid and plunged millions into darkness. Oreshkin believes that such attacks do not cause much damage to the Ukrainian army and do not change much on the battlefield. “But it is necessary to create an image of a victorious “vozhd”. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out some kind of strikes and scream for them loudly. That’s what they are doing at the moment, in my opinion,” he said. —- Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at:
