‘It is a crisis’: Putin under increasing pressure from Ukraine war

Russian President Vladimir Putin is coming under rare public criticism at home, a significant signal of how the pressures from the more than four-year war in Ukraine are hurting the country. 

Fuel shortages and rising inflation, high-profile attacks against Russian energy infrastructure and cities, and mounting military casualties are prompting prominent figures to start pinning the blame on Putin. 

“It is a crisis,” said Vladimir Milov, a Russian economist in exile who served as deputy minister of energy in 2002. “What we are seeing right now is an extreme acceleration of public admissions that we are in trouble.”

German Gref, head of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, is one of the most high-profile elites in Russia to issue blunt criticism calling for the war to end. 

“I don’t think there’s a single person who isn’t concerned about anything other than a rapid end of hostilities, that’s clear,” he reportedly said on Russian state TV earlier this week, responding to overwhelming negative economic trends.

Russia now may be reaching a breaking point, a situation brewing since it launched its full-scale invasion against Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukrainian advances in drone technology have allowed the military to batter mid- and long-range targets in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula and inside Russia. That’s resulted in both strategic and psychological victories over Putin. 

Ordinary Russian citizens are feeling the impacts on their pocketbooks. They’re experiencing strikes in major cities and are having to cancel typically idyllic vacations in Crimea on the beaches of the Black Sea.

Russian air defenses are stretched thin, and there’s not enough manpower to operate them, analysts say, leaving open targets for Ukraine to hit.  

“The Ukrainian mid-range and long-range strikes are — they’re sort of eliminating the gap, the time that Putin had thought he had to make some serious decisions,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, Russia team lead and deputy director of the Cognitive Warfare Project at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). 

Of paramount concern is whether Putin will issue orders for a general mobilization to staff up air defenses and supplement his growing manpower problem. The Russian casualty rate has likely risen by 8-to-1 over the first six months of 2026,........

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