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To see a list of previous articles, enter “Ukraine” in the Search Box on the upper right, on The Trenchant Observer web site, and you will see a list in chronological order.
Dispatches
1) Camilla Tominey, “The EU will never recover from its Ukraine shame; It was easy to forget Germany and France’s behaviour when Putin was losing. Now he may be winning, it is a total outrage, The Telegraph, May 27, 2022 (5:00 pm);
2) “Ukraine War, May 25, 2022: Russian forces advancing in Donbas, close to cutting Ukrainian supply lines; Germany apparently acting in bad faith on delivery of heavy weapons,” The Trenchant Observer, May 25, 2022.
3) Jeremy Cliffe,”Christopher Steele: “There is a serious vacuum in the Kremlin. It can’t last”; The former spy and author of the Trump-Russia dossier talks Londongrad oligarchs, Ukraine and the vulnerability of Vladimir Putin,” The New Statesman, May 25, 2022 ((updated May 26, 2022, 12:02 pm);
4) Fatma Khaled, “Putin Will ‘Be Gone by 2023,’ Likely to Sanatorium, Predicts Ex-MI6 Chief,” Newsweek, May 22, 2022 (11:43 AM EDT);
5) “Ukraine War, May 22, 2022: Putin’s catastrophic war; Putin seriously ill according to Christopher Steele and others; Current military situation,” The Trenchant Observer, May 22, 2022.
6) David Ignatius, “The secret planning that kept the White House a step ahead of Russia,” Washington Post, May 26, 2022 (4:32 p.m. EDT);
Commentary
Cliffe quotes Steele as saying Putin is unlikely to still be in power in a year, as follows:
We start with the man at the centre of it all. What are the chances that Vladimir Putin will still be in power in 12 months? “I think they are slight,” replies Steele. “There is now a serious vacuum in the Kremlin in terms of command and control. I don’t think it can last a lot longer. I think it is worse than anyone has dared to express, in terms of the collapse of governance in Russia.”
Steele says that Putin is seriously ill: “quite possibly a cancer and also Parkinson’s disease”. This vacuum means the Russian president is both micromanaging the war and cut off from its realities: “Even Hitler’s generals and field marshals would tell him the truth about what was happening on the battlefield. That has not happened in this war. Russian soldiers in Ukraine don’t know what they are up against. They don’t know the weapons systems they are up against. They don’t know the tactics that they are supposed to be using. They don’t know what their objectives are. Half the time it changes from day to day. You cannot conduct an efficient military campaign on that basis.”
Khaled reportsvthat the former head of MI6 also believes Putin will be gone. She writes:
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, predicted Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will no longer be the leader of his country by 2023 due to health issues.
The Trenchant Observer
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See also,
Only force can stop Putin
“Ukraine War, April 5, 2022 (II): Force must be used to stop Putin,” The Trenchant Observer, April
