It’s fair to say that things are not going well for Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine. Heavy losses of men and equipment and supply chain problems have forced an apparent change of plan. Instead of taking Kyiv and effectively ending resistance, Russia’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said this week that the military would “drastically reduce” its operations around Ukraine’s capital and the north of the country and refocus on the Donbas region near the Russian border in the east.
This was, Fomin said, always the main aim of the “special military operation”, a declaration which was greeted with a large and understandable degree of scepticism. Meanwhile, Putin is said to be an increasingly isolated figure in the Kremlin.
When the Russian president was a mere deputy mayor in Saint Petersburg in the mid-1990s, a fellow councillor – a psychologist – was interested enough to draw up a psychological profile of the former KGB officer and concluded Putin was an inveterate risk-taker. Historian Paul Maddrell has traced Putin’s career since taking office and finds this assessment to be borne out in just about every move he has made. But maybe the invasion of Ukraine is one gamble too far for the Russian leader?
