Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent with 30 years' reporting abroad for the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press. She has reported from more than 80 countries, with a focus on USSR/Russia and Eastern Europe.
Prigozhin’s drive toward the Russian capital — in his words a “march for justice” with unspecified intentions — reached to within 120 miles of Moscow before the surprise announcement late Saturday that a retreat had been brokered by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.
The mounting costs of Putin’s so-far failed mission to conquer Ukraine have mobilized underground opposition both inside Russia and among ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine.
The Pyrrhic victory of taking the destroyed city of Bakhmut after nine months of bloody attrition has emboldened the bombastic mercenary chief to crow about his forces coming to Putin’s rescue in the stumbling 15-month-old invasion.
Putin’s failure to take Bakhmut after eight months of stalemated combat and casualties in the tens of thousands dealt an embarrassing blow to the Kremlin leader during last week’s WWII Victory Day celebrations.
Putin's miscalculations have mounted. Harsh punishments meted out for little-known war critics are stirring discontent among Russians long tuned out of their country’s top-down politics.
While the Russian president gives no indication of reconsidering his Ukraine calamity and cutting his losses, the fractious leaders of his motley war-fighting force could erode unity and commitment among the Russia factions in the stumbling campaign on the battlefields.
The prevailing theory among human rights activists about what is motivating the poisonings is the Islamic regime’s intentional punishment of predominantly young and female protesters of endemic misogyny that have shaken Iran for six months.
Even in the throes of a reinvigorated Russian offensive in the Donbas industrial heartland, expectations remain high that Ukrainians’ motivation to defeat Putin’s aggression will end with Kyiv recovering at least the territory seized by Russia since its Feb. 24, 2022, invasion.
A self-inflicted wound called Brexit, compounded by the global economic body blows of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has laid low a mighty power.