In a real and symbolic blow that seemed to underscore how badly the war seems to have gone for Russia, the country's Defense Ministry said late on April 14 that the missile cruiser Moskva - the name means Moscow - sank in the Black Sea during a storm after a fire on board detonated ammunition and damaged the hull. There appears to be little likelihood of the former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) chief being driven from power anytime soon in an internal coup at the hands of his security agencies, despite signs of unrest in the power structures in Moscow - with a senior Federal Security Service officer, Sergei Beseda, reportedly tossed in the infamous Lefortovo jail after feeding Putin bad intelligence that led to major miscalculations about how the invasion would go. Russia is in many ways more isolated than it was in the Cold War,” he wrote, adding: “Unless major Western states elect leaders with very different political priorities, it seems virtually unthinkable that sanctions will be eased while Russia occupies Ukrainian territory and Putin remains in power.” “The prospect of even a temporary halt to the war, already slim, is now remote. They will “entrench Ukrainian hostility towards Russia,” they are “driving the Russian public into a dark place,” and they “show that, as long as Russia occupies Ukrainian territory, an end to fighting does not mean an end to violence,” Gould-Davies wrote.
“The mass torture and killings carried out by Russian forces in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka and other Ukrainian towns add a new level of horror to a terrible war,” but they also “change the strategic context in three ways,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in an April 12 article. They also appear to have also altered the course of the war and affected its potential outcome, as well as the roles of Washington and the West. Obviously, the alleged atrocities underpinning the use by Biden and others of these terms deepen the human suffering that Putin has caused by unleashing the unprovoked invasion. Those accusations are based an alleged actions of Russian forces in Ukraine and Putin’s repeated statements about Ukrainians and their country, which he has frequently said has no right to existas a sovereign state. On April 12, he accused Russia of committing “genocide,” saying that Putin is trying to “wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also said Russia’s war is genocidal. President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal” and said evidence should be gathered for use at a war crimes trial. Just a few weeks later, allegations and evidence of war crimes are emerging - many of them in towns near Kyiv where retreating Russian forces have left a trail of death, destruction - the sickening stuff of countless horror stories from survivors. Then came the invasion of Ukraine – a large-scale offensive against an independent country that had been under intense pressure from Moscow since 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula and fomented separatism across the east and south, resulting in a war that had killed more than 13,000 combatants and civilians in the region known as the Donbas before Putin launched the new assault on February 24. In the year after the return of Kremlin opponent Aleksei Navalny in January 2021, following treatment in Germany for a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin, the state turned screws that had already been cranked tight, broadening and deepening a clampdown on political opposition, independent media, civil society, and all forms of dissent. The current era seems to be giving those times a run for their money. Over the years of Putin’s rule, with the Kremlin pressing harder and harder against dissent, Russians determined to push back have come up with creative ways to protest - and not a few poignant slogans that seem to capture the mood.Īt a demonstration outside the Defense Ministry maybe 15 years ago, one woman held a sign that read, “There have been worse times, but none so revolting.” Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward. A warship sinks, accusations of atrocities, war crimes, and genocide mount, and despite a relentless clampdown, determined Russians find ways to protest President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.