Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been a paranoid man. We know, for example, that he has long eschewed the use of a personal cellphone, all too aware of how easily they can be tracked.
Yet a Kremlin document recently leaked to the press by a European intelligence service lays bare a whole new level of suspicion. Visitors can only approach him after they’ve gone through two layers of screening. His bodyguards now exercise full control over his schedule of appearances; they’ve essentially eliminated visits to any location that has to do with the military. And as for mobile phones: No one who works near Putin is now allowed to have one—they can only carry devices that aren’t connected to the internet. Surveillance systems have been placed in the homes of the cooks, drivers, and cleaners who work for him; they are prohibited from using public transportation. Most revealingly, he and his family members no longer live in their customary residences. Instead, they are sticking to secret locations with extra layers of protection. The document claims that Putin now works only in bunkers dispersed around southern Russia.
It is possible, of course, that the spies who passed this document along to the media are playing a game of their own—perhaps using disinformation to sow dissension and mistrust within the Kremlin. But the details revealed by the leak make perfect sense given the constraints that Putin suddenly finds himself facing.
In January, U.S. forces succeeded in snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of his compound without suffering a single fatality. At the end of February, the Israelis killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war against Iran—and a host of other top Iranian leaders as well. Nor was it the first time that they were able to finger individual targets in Tehran. The Americans and Israelis have pulled off these operations through a combination of carefully cultivated human sources and signals intelligence, tracking the cellphone calls and internet use not just of the people targeted but also of their aides, guards, and support staffs. All this means that dictators can no longer sleep as easily as they used to.
The former head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov—now chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky—is known to be a student of Israeli targeted killings. His studies have paid off: The Ukrainians have assassinated a string of Russian military officers, politicians, and propagandists—some of them in the heart of Moscow.
In December, a car bomb in the capital took out Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov. That particular hit seems to have sent a collective shiver through Russia’s power elite, allegedly—according to that leaked document—prompting a meeting of top security officials that had them blaming each other for lapses real and imagined. Given that Russia has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Zelensky, Putin has every reason to believe that he, too, has a target on his back.
Putin may well fear internal enemies as much as he does the Ukrainians; rumors of coup plots are rampant in Moscow. But the Russian president’s problems are actually bigger than that. He’s managed to stay in power for 26 years by always keeping a few steps ahead of his enemies. Now he may be running out of room to maneuver.
A Russian offensive planned for this spring has been derailed before it’s gotten off the ground. The Ukrainians claim to have inflicted 35,000 casualties on the Russians in March alone—the fifth straight month, according to Kyiv, that the number of Russians killed and seriously wounded has exceeded the Kremlin’s rate of recruiting fresh soldiers. Perhaps more importantly, the sacrifices of those soldiers were entirely in vain; no major objectives were achieved. “Ukraine is not just doing better than expected,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Time is not on Russia’s side in this war.”
Indeed, the Ukrainians have now actually pushed the Russians back along several stretches of the front. Putin’s military leaders appear to have no new ideas on how to alter the fundamental dynamic on the battlefield. Unless they can change that, throwing fresh manpower into the fight will prove equally fruitless.
The Ukrainians, by contrast, seem to have an endless supply of new ideas. Every day brings the unveiling of some startling new piece of technology or creative use of an old one. Every day also brings news of another audacious strike deep in the Russian heartland. On April 25, for example, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian airfield in the southern Urals city of Chelyabinsk—a little more than 1,100 miles away from Ukraine.
Kyiv’s forces have devoted considerable resources to eliminating Russian air defenses, which now simply aren’t sufficient to protect every strategic target. At one point a few weeks ago, the threat of Ukrainian attacks closed all four of Moscow’s international airports at the same time. Indeed, the growing range of Ukrainian strikes appears to have influenced the Kremlin’s decision to exclude military equipment from taking part in Victory Day celebrations on May 9. Humiliatingly, Putin even felt compelled to ask U.S. President Donald Trump to dissuade the Ukrainians from attacking during the parade. The Russians are clearly rattled.
Yet Kyiv is not staging such strikes for the sake of psychological impact. The evidence suggests that Ukrainian planners are thinking harder than ever about how to maximize the impact of their attacks. At the end of April, a Ukrainian long-range drone attack on an oil refinery in Perm, more than 900 miles away from the border, targeted distillation columns—the systems that enable the separation of crude oil into gasoline and other petroleum products. Hitting storage tanks provides spectacular footage of fires, but they are relatively easy to repair; core infrastructure like these columns is a different matter altogether. “The Ukrainians have developed a theory of victory which involves the destruction of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Without that, it becomes very difficult for Russia to sustain what they’re doing.”
At the end of March, a Reuters analysis concluded that the strike campaign had succeeded in cutting Russia’s oil export capacity by 40 percent. Admittedly, this may not be enough to fully offset the windfall that Moscow has gained from the sharp rise in global oil prices unleashed by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Even so, in the first quarter of this year, Russia’s budget deficit already exceeded its full-year target. Financial officials cited a 45 percent drop in oil and gas revenues.
This pattern of smart targeting repeats itself across industries. In their attacks on chemical plants, semiconductor fabrication facilities, and steel factories, the Ukrainians keep hitting core components of the industrial processes that feed Russia’s military machine. Strikingly, the Russians seem incapable of paying back Ukraine in the same coin.
The decentralization of Ukraine’s military production—scattered across myriad small factories in inconspicuous locations—is making it extremely hard for the Russians to find effective targets. So they keep attacking power plants and civilians, cruel tactics that may actually serve to stiffen Ukrainian spines.
That the momentum has shifted in Ukraine’s favor is also demonstrated by Zelensky’s increasingly confident tone toward the United States. “In my view, Russia played the Americans again—played the president of the United States,” he said recently, commenting on Trump’s policy of allowing Russia to skirt sanctions on oil sales. The days of flattery and appeasement are over.
Of course, Ukraine has plenty of problems. Its embrace of drones is driven in part by its persistent manpower personnel shortages; many Ukrainian men are refusing to join the military. And the government continues to contend with corruption scandals.
Even so, Kyiv is enjoying a boost in its international standing even as Moscow faces new headwinds. The war in Iran has given new diplomatic openings to the Ukrainians, who have been leveraging their anti-drone expertise to find new friends among the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Trump seems so sufficiently preoccupied with his own war that he is finding fewer opportunities to pressure Kyiv into unfavorable peace deals.
And the recent electoral defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has robbed Putin of his most trustworthy friend in the European Union. Orban’s exit has finally enabled the EU to break the deadlock over a long-anticipated $106 billion assistance package to Kyiv. That’s enough to keep the Ukrainians in weaponry for a long time to come—entirely apart from the variety of joint ventures for arms production that they have created with partners across the world.
Just to add insult to injury, Moscow is also in the process of losing one of its vaunted new allies in Africa: The Moscow-supported military government in Mali is losing its fight against Islamist rebels.
Losing Mali won’t be enough to cost Putin his throne. But losing the war in Ukraine certainly could—especially when combined with a stagnant economy, restless oligarchs, and a population riled by the Kremlin’s recent crackdown on the internet. Even Russia’s military bloggers, long the most enthusiastic supporters of the war, are starting to lose faith. “Little by little, the advantage is going to our enemies,” one of them recently wrote. “[T]he enemy is counterattacking, and he is succeeding.” Other Russians may well be coming to the same conclusion.
Source: Christian Caryl, “Vladimir Putin Is Much Weaker Than You Think,” Foreign Policy, 6 May 2026. You can thank for me for depaywalling this article by encouraging your friends, relatives, and colleagues to check out this website. ||||| trr
Just days after Vladimir Putin secured a ceasefire from U.S. President Donald Trump to hold his Victory Day parade, Russia launched a massive air assault on Ukraine, killing at least 16 people in Kyiv and injuring dozens more.
Hi, my name is Oleksiy Sorokin, deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Independent, and this is the latest issue of our newsletter about Russia.
Today, let’s once again talk about why attempting to reach a peace settlement with Putin is a waste of everyone’s time.
Russian President Putin held his parade. Normally, the event is designed as a grand demonstration of military strength and imperial confidence.
This year, it lasted just 45 minutes.
There were no tanks. No heavy equipment. The atmosphere felt restrained, almost uneasy — less a celebration of victory than an attempt to preserve the illusion of power.
After securing Trump’s support for a ceasefire that would effectively ensure Ukraine would not exploit Russia’s weakened air defenses on a day of deep symbolic importance, Putin adopted a different tone regarding the war in Ukraine.
“I think (the war in Ukraine) is coming to an end,” Putin said on May 9. He steered clear of many of the triumphalist themes that have long dominated his public rhetoric. In a somewhat amusing shift, Putin referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “Mr. Zelensky” for what may have been the first time in years.
Putin had typically resorted to labeling Ukrainian leadership “Nazi sympathizers” or “drug addicts.”
Yet, the three-day-long ceasefire ended, and Russia once again pummeled Ukraine with missiles and drones. The partly collapsed residential building in one of Kyiv’s neighborhoods, with bodies being pulled from under the rubble, became the glaring illustration of Russia’s intent for peace.
What this episode demonstrated, once again, is that Putin treats negotiations not as a path to peace, but as a weapon of war.
Every pause is used to regroup. Every phone call with Western leaders is presented domestically as proof that Russia cannot be isolated. Every public discussion about concessions reinforces the Kremlin’s core belief that time remains on its side.
This is why attempts to “bring Russia to the table” under current conditions do not bring the war closer to an end — rather, they prolong it.
The logic in the White House still seems to be that if Russia is offered enough diplomatic offramps, enough recognition, enough patience, it may eventually choose compromise over continued aggression. But the past four years have shown the opposite. Russia escalates when it senses hesitation. It hardens its demands when it sees fear of escalation on the other side. And it interprets calls for immediate negotiations not as signs of strength or pragmatism, but as exhaustion.
For Putin, the war has never been only about territory. It is about restoring Russian dominance over Ukraine. Russian demands have remained maximalist. Despite mounting military and economic strain, Putin hasn’t moved one inch.
Negotiations, when offered before Russia faces undeniable military, economic, or political pressure, only invite the Russian leader to repeat his maximalist wants.
Ukraine did secure something in return for agreeing to a three-day ceasefire: If everything goes according to plan, a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia will take place on May 15.
That alone justifies allowing Putin to hold his parade. If the price of letting Putin stage a carefully choreographed 45-minute parade was bringing 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners home, that is a trade most Ukrainians would take every time.
But it would be a mistake to confuse this with progress toward peace, or a hint that Russia’s attitude toward Ukraine or the West has changed.
Putin’s comments about the war’s nearing end are domestic messaging to assure the public that everything is going according to plan. It does not, but Putin won’t budge.
At this point, negotiations with the Kremlin often resemble a very specific genre of political theater.
And yet, much of the international discussion continues to revolve around finding the right formula, the right incentive, the right “off-ramp” that will finally persuade Putin to stop the war he chose to start.
There is no indication that the Kremlin is currently prepared to accept a settlement that falls short of its broader wartime objectives. Until Russia faces costs that outweigh those ambitions, negotiations are more likely to drag out the war than bring it to an end.
Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, WTF is wrong with Russia? newsletter (Kyiv Independent), 14 May 2026
Russia launched one of the longest and most massive air attacks since the start of its full-scale invasion just days after the recent ceasefire expired.
Over the course of 30 hours, Russia launched more than 1,500 drones at Ukrainian cities, along with over 50 ballistic and cruise missiles, Zelenskyy said.
After a drone strike on the capital, part of a high-rise apartment building collapsed in Kyiv, and rescuers recovered the body of a 12-year-old girl from the rubble.
“We live in a building across the road,” said Olesia Holub-Korba, a Kyiv resident who was just meters from the high-rise last night.
Olesia typically does not go to the shelter during air raids because she [has] to keep running up and down from the 20th floor at night with her young son.
“I always go and lie down in bed with my child so that if there are any falling fragments, I can cover them with my body, and if it’s a missile, then either we survive together, or we…[die],” she told The Counteroffensive.
Olesia and her family had just gone to bed, not yet asleep, when a very loud explosion sounded. Lying on the floor, she literally felt the building shaking.
“Fuck,” she said to her husband, “it’s a direct hit on us.” Olesia’s husband reassured her that it nothing had hit their building, at least not yet.
Fortunately, her family is safe.
However, twenty people from the damaged residential building are still considered missing from the building, which has a completely destroyed entrance, which prevents survivors inside from escaping. Emergency services continue search operations under the debris, which will apparently last into the night.
On the first day of last week’s ceasefire, Putin told reporters that he thinks the war is “coming to an end.”
Zelenskyy responded: “These are certainly not the actions of those who believe the war is coming to an end.”
Government-funded Ukrainian news organization United24 reported that this was the longest and largest aerial attack since the start of the full-scale invasion, though that superlative could not be independently verified by The Counteroffensive. The assault ended on the morning of May 14.
97 percent of the drones launched toward Ukraine were neutralized, according to a report from the Ukrainian Air Force, as were 73 percent of missiles.
Although the vast majority of air targets were successfully downed, Russia damaged around 180 buildings, including 50 residential buildings across Ukraine. In Kyiv, at least five people were killed and dozens more injured. Over 100 people have been injured across the country.
Russia has changed its tactics and is now deliberately trying to stretch out attacks in order to exhaust Ukraine’s air defenses. During the day, Russia sent hundreds of attack drones mainly to the west of Ukraine to exhaust the air defense. In the late evening, there was a second wave of strikes, followed by missiles, targeting the capital.
Russia’s Defense Ministry described the strike as a “massive retaliatory attack” for recent Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russia.
Zelenskyy stated that there will be a “fair” response to that.
The massive attacks come just days after a decree from Zelenskyy effectively ‘allowed’ Putin to host his WWII Victory Day Parade in Moscow’s Red Square, though the celebration was scaled down, likely due to fear of Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. Putin’s anxiety over the annual event signaled a shift in Moscow’s projection of power.
On May 8, Trump announced the 3-day ceasefire, and both Putin and Zelenskyy agreed to its terms, which included a 1,000 for 1,000 prisoner swap.
That ceasefire, though fragile as ever on the front lines with both sides alleging a breach, technically expired on Tuesday, May 12, marked by a mutual exchange of fire.
Over the course of the past week, Putin and Trump — the latter of whom campaigned on a promise to end this war in 24 hours — both said they think the war will end soon during the days leading up to last night’s attacks.
Also, for the first time ever, Putin said he is prepared to meet with Zelenskyy in a third country, outside of Moscow, but only in pursuit of a final agreement that ends the war.
Source: Mariana Lastovyria and Jacqueline Cole, “NEWSFLASH: Putin launches massive attacks after signaling war’s end,” The Counteroffensive, 14 May 2026. You can thank for me for depaywalling this article by encouraging your friends, relatives, and colleagues to check out this website. ||||| trr
