Municipal deputies for the Smolninskoye District in St. Petersburg plan to submit a petition to the State Duma (the Russian parliament) to charge Russian president Vladimir Putin with high treason for unleashing the war in Ukraine. Deputy Dmitry Palyuga announced the intention on Twitter.
Not the real Igor Girkin. The comment “Firm and clear! And don’t panic!” is a sarcastic quotation of what Russian milbloggers are saying.
Obviously, not all Russians support the war or share the Kremlin’s fascist ideology, but is there a significant anti-war opposition in Russia? Where is the Russian “General de Gaulle” rising against the corrupt and genocidal Kremlin regime? Or are the people awaiting Russian popular revolt just “waiting for Godot” [4]?
Ukraine’s counterattack and advance in this part of the country seems to have hit the Russians largely by surprise. Impressive, in an era of ubiquitous spy satellite coverage when troop and equipment positions are pretty much known to everyone in real time.
Shelling destroys power infrastructure in Enerhodar, says UN nuclear watchdog
Shelling has destroyed power infrastructure at the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar where staff operating the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant live, posing a growing threat to the plant, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday.
Reuters reports:
The plant’s offsite power lines, vital lines of defence against potential nuclear meltdown, have already been cut and the shelling at Enerhodar has caused a lasting blackout there.
That has prompted Ukraine to say it may have to shut down the last operating reactor supplying power to Zaporizhzhia including the cooling systems for the plant’s nuclear fuel.
“This is an unsustainable situation and is becoming increasingly precarious. Enerhodar has gone dark. The power plant has no offsite power. And we have seen that once infrastructure is repaired, it is damaged once again,” International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said in a statement.
Whereas this morning NPR had Gen. Milley on talking about the problem with Ukraine crossing the Dnieper, this looks like they’ve raced past the Dnieper and are advancing on the Oskil.
I’ll be very interested to see if the deteriorating situation ends up creating more of a political problem for Putin from the nationalist/cult-of-victory wing that he’s spent much of his administration cultivating than the mostly already repressed liberal opposition could ever hope to pose.
Those guys are quite likely more numerous; and pretty much certain to be much better represented in military, police, and intelligence jobs that give you the position and/or skills required to make a lot of trouble.
I suspect that expecting any direct analog would be naïve and unrealistic given the differences; but I can’t help but think back to when France ended up with a putsch, the OAS carrying out a fairly prolific terror campaign, and De Gaulle very nearly getting shot: not for fighting an unpopular and futile war in support of a tenuous territorial claim that the public ultimately didn’t really care about enough to sacrifice for; but for stopping that unpopular and futile war and, at least in practice, giving up the territorial claim as not worth the trouble.
