JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin retreats deeper into his labyrinth” – Washington Post
“More than a year into the war he launched … Putin is confronted with failure. Over months of offensives, the Russian war machine faltered badly, failing to capture Kyiv and buckling on other fronts …. What Putin spuriously billed as a mission to ‘denazify’ Russia’s neighbor has turned into … grinding, attritional battles, punctuated by reports of Russian atrocities and war crimes. … Russian troops killed or wounded … may reach more than 200,000, its economy has been hobbled by … sanctions, and its society has fallen further into the autocratic clutches of an embittered despot …. Putin’s own delusions are hard to ignore. It seems increasingly clear that the war he started was the product less of strategic calculation than neo-imperialist hubris. Putin spouts nostalgia for a lost Russian empire and grievance over the dismantling of the Soviet Union. He declared … that he did not consider Ukraine a legitimate sovereign nation. … [H]e sees himself marching grandiosely in the footsteps of a cohort of long-deceased Russian czars as he seeks to unwind the international order. …”