Events in Ukraine and Washington may have reached a tipping point in the last few days for the two men responsible for much of the recent instability in the global order. For Vladimir Putin and his protégé and enabler Donald Trump, the end game is surely in sight.
The grand illusions that carried them to the pinnacles of power are being slowly and systematically broken. Putin’s on the rich soils and flat landscape of eastern Ukraine and Trump’s in the US legal system where the former president faces a number of investigations any of which could result in a lengthy jail term.
How fitting it would be for both to receive their due at the same time.
Ukraine counter offensive
After six months of brutal fighting, the tide of war in Ukraine has turned decisively against Moscow.
The Ukrainian counter offensive which began just a few days ago has surprised western analysts with its speed and reach. Around 3,000 square kilometres in the Kharkiv region, including dozens of towns and villages and the cities of Izyum and Kupyansk, are said to have been liberated from Russian control.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), since 6 September Ukrainian forces have “penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometres” and recovered more territory than Russia had captured since April.
Ukraine is struggling to cope with rising numbers of POWs, while Russia is said to have become Ukraine’s largest weapons supplier such is the quantity of equipment captured or abandoned by fleeing Russian troops. In a single day, Russians retreating from Izyum donated more artillery and armour to Ukraine than Germany and France have in more than eight years of war, so it is claimed.
The Russians are thought to be unable to mount a successful counterattack due to a chronic shortage of both human resources and equipment. By some independent accounts Russia has lost a third of its entire conventional forces (54 battalion tactical groups out of 170 in total) including more than 50,000 troops (Ukrainian estimates) killed in just six months.
The full list of verified equipment losses since the beginning of the war is stunning (documented HERE) .
Putin’s much acclaimed army appears to be almost spent. His forces have been humbled, he has been personally humiliated abroad and politically weakened at home.
Russian deputies call on Putin to quit
A few days ago in St Petersburg, municipal deputies of the Smolninskoye district announced plans to appeal to the State Duma in the coming days to accuse Putin of the crime of high treason because of the war in Ukraine. One deputy said, “the decision was supported by the majority of deputies present”. It is reported that the seven who voted in favour have all now been fined.
Emboldened council deputies in the Lomonosovsky municipal district of Moscow quickly followed. In a letter addressed to Putin, they called on him “to relieve yourself of your post due to the fact that your views, your management model are hopelessly outdated and hinder the development of Russia and its human potential”.
While not mentioning directly the war in Ukraine, it did refer to how Russia had now become “feared and hated” while “aggression” has taken the country back to the “Cold War era”.
Russian Telegram propaganda channels are apparently referring to the Kharkiv debacle as “a catastrophe”, with some also calling Putin an “idiot” while regretting he was not stopped in 2008.
Russian TV broadcast a programme where one pundit openly called the special military operation a “colonial war” and said it was now “impossible to defeat Ukraine” without full mobilisation. It was not something he advocated although yesterday a member of the security committee of State Duma did just that.
Here’s the clip:
Originally tweeted by Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) on 11 September 2022.
It’s hard to see how full mobilisation will help given the sheer scale of Russian equipment losses
Another commentator (about 5 minutes, 20 seconds in), rather belatedly one might think, called for a hearts and minds operation to convince Ukrainians that their future lays with Russia. Some hope.
This may not mean the end of Putin – yet
Despite the scale of the humiliation, none of this may lead to Putin’s immediate downfall. His approval rating was 83% in July, up more than 10 percentage points, but there is much more bad news to come. Leaders in Russia often look secure – until they don’t. Defeat in Ukraine could yet trigger regime change.
In the last few days Putin has postponed a meeting with his generals in Sochi, close to his billion dollar estate on the Black Sea coast, as if unable to take in what the Moscow Times claimed was the worst defeat since the beginning of the war, losing in a matter of days vast swathes of territory that had taken months to capture at the cost of thousands of Russian lives.
This morning there are credible reports from Ukraine’s southern command that some Russian troops around the city of Kherson were preparing to surrender. The Russian front line is said to be collapsing after the key Antonovsky bridge over the Dnipro River in Kherson used to resupply the occupying forces, was put out of action.
Partisans in areas still under Russian control are harrying the demoralised occupiers while Ukrainian forces are buoyed up by recent advances in the north around Kharkiv.
The Russian economy has withstood western sanctions better than many feared but is still expected to contract by more than 4% this year. Europe is adapting to Putin’s energy war. Norway has displaced Russia as Europe’s largest supplier of gas. Germany is slowly weaning itself off its reliance on NordStream 1, a situation likely to persist after Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, told his MPs that a partnership with Putin’s “aggressive, imperialist Russia is inconceivable for the foreseeable future”.
Mikhail Fridman, a Russian businessman, has offered $1bn to Ukraine in exchange for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy persuading the UK to lift sanctions against him. Think about that.
Sanctions are clearly having an effect.
Russian military might has been exposed as a fiction
Ukraine has revealed Russia’s military as a disorganised, ill-disciplined but murderous rabble, badly led and poorly equipped. NATO planners will have been reassured. It will take Russia decades – a change of both leadership and constitution together with a lengthy war crimes trial – to recover from the Ukraine debacle.
The whole invasion was built on a false premise. Putin authorised billions of dollars in bribes to be paid to Ukrainian politicians, officials and key figures in Kyiv’s intelligence and military hierarchy to ensure the Russian invasion proceeded virtually unopposed. Unfortunately, the money never got past the FSB’s 5th Directorate with responsibility for Ukraine. Not a penny reached the intended recipients.
Senior figures in the department thought plans for an invasion were crazy and simply would never happen, so pocketed the cash themselves.
The head of the FSB 5th Directorate has now been arrested, along with his deputy, for embezzlement from the state. The whole of the department is under criminal investigation and many others are also under arrest on embezzlement charges. Apparently, everyone was getting a slice of the cake.
Putin appeared to believe he and his cronies were the only group capable of diverting state funds into their own bank accounts while the rest of Russian bureaucracy were paragons of honesty. It was a fatal error.
Trump’s legal problems grow
Trump’s problem is the reverse of Putin’s. In Russia the entire machinery of government is hopelessly corrupted. In America it is not. This may prove unfortunate for the 45th president, the man who came to Washington to ‘drain the swamp’.
There are serious claims, admittedly on social media, by the author Tomi T Ahonen that Trump faces six different potential ‘paths’ to prison. And even this is incomplete. Ahonen’s lists is below:
- Tax fraud by the Trump organisations. This is being investigated by the New York attorney general where Trump’s former finance chief Allen Weisselberg, who worked for the Trump family for five decades, has already pleaded guilty and is now cooperating with the authorities.
- Various crimes allegedly committed by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, between 2019 and 2021 including taking money from Dmytro Firtash, an Oligarch said to be linked to Putin, and paid via Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American businessman, in return for removing the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. During an FBI raid on Giuliani’s office, agents apparently recovered 18 mobile phones that Ahonen claims Giuliani begged a judge to destroy rather than let them fall into the hands of the Department of Justice (DoJ). The judge ordered any evidence to be preserved.
- Concerns over claims about the sale of presidential pardons by Trump. Ahonen for example, alleges Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, who is being investigated by the Justice Department over a possible sexual relationship with a 17-year-old sought a pardon from the then president that was apparently “as broad as you could describe, from the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things”.
- Trump’s involvement in organising the 6 January insurrection. The congressional committee headed by his long-time critic Liz Cheney, continues to get closer and closer to Trump himself. Ahonen likens the former president to the head of a mafia mob and claims, as is usual with the most senior mobsters, he will be the last to face trial – presumably for sedition. Former White House attorneys Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann are said to be cooperating with the FBI along with dozens of officials.
- Relates to allegations that the head of Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016, Tom Barrack, engaged in illegal lobbying on behalf of the UAE which apparently had a major impact on Trump’s policy in the Middle East, most notably in 2017 when the UAE and Saudi Arabia declared a blockade against neighbouring Gulf state, Qatar. Barrack was arrested last year and then released on a $250mn bail.
- The final ‘path’ is the unlawful removal of classified documents from the White House to his house at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) were trying for a year from January 2021 to get Trump to return missing documents, many classified as top secret, before referring the issue to the DoJ who called in the FBI. A raid by federal agents on 8 August recovered 12 boxes of files, including 43 folders marked classified which were found to be empty. Trump is being investigated under the US Espionage Act.
On this last issue, in an interesting move, his legal team’s most recent filing attempted to portray the issue as nothing more than “a document storage dispute that has spiraled [sic] out of control”. It hardly seems like a serious defence since the excuse could be applied to theft of every kind.
Another investigation begins
The list doesn’t include the grand jury which was recently sworn in to examine a PAC (political action committee) which Trump used to raise money for his political campaigning. Investigators are looking at where the $130mn dollars raised so far has been spent.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has alleged that the Save America PAC has been scamming its donors:
“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for. So not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off.”
So, Trump is fighting legal battles on at least seven fronts, most of which carry sentences of life imprisonment although he could escape with a mere 12–15 years if found guilty only of tax fraud.
His own vexatious case is thrown out
Also, the former POTUS filed a legal action back in March against various adversaries (some unnamed!) including the DoJ, the FBI, the media and Hillary Clinton.
He claimed, apparently without irony:
“The Defendants, blinded by political ambition, orchestrated a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
A judge threw that out last week (read the damning judgment HERE) with a ruling that was absolutely scathing. Trump and his legal team have been totally humiliated.
Donald M Middlebrooks, a US district judge, in a ruling that seemed to sum up Trump’s entire life and career, said:
“Many of the Amended Complaint’s characterizations of events are implausible because they lack any specific allegations which might provide factual support for the conclusions reached.
“For instance, the contention that former FBI director James Comey, senior FBI officials, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “overzealously targeted” Plaintiff and conspired to harm him through appointment of special counsel are strikingly similar to the conclusory and formulaic allegations found deficient in the seminal Supreme Court case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009).
“What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances.”
Trump’s days as a free man are surely numbered.
