Putin under pressure to leave office

 Daily Beast:

More and more Russian officials are urging Vladimir Putin to get the hell out of the Kremlin as Moscow suffered another series of humiliating defeats in Ukraine this weekend.

Just one day after several municipal deputies in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg called on the State Duma to try the Russian leader for treason, their colleagues in Moscow joined in and demanded he step down because his views are “hopelessly outdated.”

The open letter to Putin from municipal deputies in the Russian capital’s Lomonosovsky district started out by seemingly trying to let him down gently, telling him he had “good reforms” in his first term and part of his second.

But then, “everything went wrong,” the deputies said.

“The rhetoric that you and your subordinates use has been riddled with intolerance and aggression for a long time, which in the end effectively threw our country back into the Cold War era. Russia has again begun to be feared and hated, we are once again threatening the whole world with nuclear weapons,” the letter read.

“We ask you to relieve yourself of your post due to the fact that your views and your governance model are hopelessly outdated and hinder the development of Russia and its human potential,” the deputies said in closing.

Though they made no mention of the war against Ukraine, their plea came as Putin’s deranged “special military operation” next door took a spectacular nosedive, with thousands of Russian forces fleeing as Ukraine’s military launched a series of surprise counter-offensives and reclaimed nearly 400 square miles of territory in a matter of days.

Even as Russian defense officials sought to play down the mass surrender as nothing more than a strategic maneuver, it was clearly not perceived that way even by many of Putin’s most loyal cronies.
...

The Ukraine invasion was a massive mistake and it is not clear that Putin is willing to recognize that.  His failure to do so will lead to more challenges to his leadership.  Russia is a much weaker country than it was seen as before the Ukraine invasion.  

See, also:

Ukrainian official claims southern offensive was 'disinformation' to distract Russia from real offensive in Kharkiv

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