Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned Russians. He said that they have to be prepared for the times to come as this war is going to be a long one. Peskov told a gathering of the country’s political elite that things would get very difficult. It will take a very, very long time. This is very different from Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine.
Kiev should have been conquered in a matter of days or weeks. Once there, Russia will be able to free Ukrainians from ‘gangs of drug addicts and neo-Nazis’. He said that the war which was going to take several days or weeks may now take several years.
became a bitter struggle for the existence of Russia
Far from saving Ukraine from fascists, the struggle has now become a bitter struggle for Russia’s existence. As Putin recently told workers at an aviation factory, this is not a geopolitical task for us.
This was brilliantly brought out recently in the BBC documentary ‘Putin vs the West’. It took a close look at changes in Russian political rhetoric over the past decade. This is the period we can accurately refer to as “Putin II”.
Let us inform that in the year 2012, Putin made his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev the President for one time. Actually, there was a constitutional ban on getting the presidency for three consecutive terms. After this, Putin again got the top post. Since then he has raised some degree of historical nationalism.
In 2008, in a meeting with then US President George W. Bush, Putin raised questions on Ukrainian sovereignty. Then he said, “George, you have to understand that Ukraine isn’t even a country.” Shortly after his troops entered Crimea in March 2014, he broached the subject, stressing that it was the Bolsheviks who had given much of southeast Russia to Kiev.
