Vladimir Putin’s most trusted allies have been quietly hanging him out to dry in secretive discussions with top officials in Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, 48, claimed in a national address on Thursday that figures close to the Russian president, 73, have reached out to say he alone caused Russia’s war and the losses it has suffered, the Times of London reports.
That alleged message comes at arguably the lowest ebb of Putin’s 26 years in power. Ukrainian drones have over the past several months torched refineries, fuel depots, and warehouses hundreds of miles behind the front line, forcing the Kremlin to ration fuel and dragging a conflict that has spent four years playing out in someone else’s country firmly onto Russian soil.
Zelensky said the strikes have bred a “toxic atmosphere” around the Kremlin chief. “Putin alone is the reason for the losses the Russians are suffering,” he said.
The Russian president is largely surrounded by spy-service veterans he met in his KGB years, along with powerful oligarchs who control much of the country’s infrastructure.
The trouble has been building for months. Fuel shortages resulting from Ukrainian attacks have reached roughly 50 million Russians, about a third of the population, and waits at some pumps have run to several days. A Kremlin-linked pollster clocked a five-point slide in Putin’s approval rating this month, representing the steepest weekly drop since his deeply unpopular 2022 mobilization order.
It has pulled Putin onto the defensive. His Defense Ministry has claimed 64,000 drone shootdowns over home territory in the first six months of this year, as the Kremlin scrambled to haul air defense batteries back from the front line to shield Moscow, the Russian capital.
The strikes are also now hitting Russians in the pocket. Overnight raids this week burned a number of depots belonging to Wildberries, the online marketplace that serves as Russia’s answer to Amazon, killing eight workers and injuring dozens of others. Sellers are likely to have lost around $2 million in stock, according to independent Russian outlet Meduza.
Zelensky’s remarks coincided with the first sit-down between Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, 76, since September. The pair talked for a little over 30 minutes in the Philippine capital of Manila on the margins of a regional summit.
Neither side sounded hopeful about ending the war President Donald Trump, 80, promised to resolve on “day one” of his second presidency. Moscow has cautioned against “excessive optimism,” while Rubio says that pushing Kyiv to hand over land for peace was “not acceptable to Ukraine.”
Lavrov restated Moscow’s demand for all of the Donbas, the coal and heavy-industry belt in eastern Ukraine that Russian-backed separatists carved up in 2014 and that Putin’s army has never fully taken.
