07/04/26

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, according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

It describes the figures as “astounding” and estimated that 450,000 Russian soldiers have been killed throughout the war, among 1.4 million casualties. The CSIS estimates Russia is losing more soldiers per month than it can recruit, at 30,000 compared to 27,000.

Stepanenko said Putin also has the option to nationalize industries to address gas and fuel shortages as a result of Ukraine’s successful attack on oil facilities. Reuters reported Wednesday that Russia has started importing gas from India to make up for shortages across the country’s 11 time zones. Russians are facing rationing, long lines at gas stations and record-high prices. 

Stepanenko said there are no signals yet that Putin is moving toward making some of these hard decisions and instead is willing to absorb what he views as temporary pain in exchange for pushing forward on the front line against Ukraine. 

But Russian forces are stalled, and it’s unclear if Putin is denying, unwilling to confront or misinformed about the true nature of the battlefield. 

A reportedly leaked Russian Ministry of Defense map from April showed Russian forces occupying Ukrainian towns it had failed to capture. The ISW said it had reason to believe the map was authentic and matched claims of military advances and victories from top Russian generals.

Stepanenko said it’s possible Putin is operating on misinformation.

“If that’s something presented by a top general, I don’t imagine Putin goes out of his way to verify these claims,” she said.

Public criticism against Putin is a “fresh development,” Milov said, still generally mild but no longer a taboo. 

Milov said Russia faces an “unholy trinity” that is culminating this year: Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) began to contract in the first quarter of 2026, the budget deficit is ballooning and inflation is rising. 

“The government is effectively funding the deficit through monetary emission, through printing money, which has enormous pro-inflationary effects,” he said, “which fuels inflation again, prevents the Central Bank from cutting rates and investment is going down.”

But Milov said any political change in Russia is hard to predict, with Putin having destroyed and criminalized all manners of political organization and opposition. Milov said the Russian public had evolved toward adaption and survival. He said Russia is more likely to experience a major rupture similar to other points in its history, like the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.  

“At some point it collapses and there’s no one to defend it,” he said.

Putin’s pain is self-inflicted, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is looking to drive the knife deeper to force the Russian leader to the negotiating table. 

On June 25, Zelensky posted on social media a photo of him meeting with the head of the Ukrainian Secret Service and announced a “40-day influence operation” aimed at compelling Russia to end the war. 

Days later, Zelensky said Ukraine’s domestically produced long-range cruise missile, the Flamingo, had struck targets in Russia’s Volgograd oblast, or administrative district. The distance from Ukrainian control territory to the target could be around 600 miles, making the Flamingo comparable to Western-provided cruise missiles, like the United Kingdom’s Storm Shadow missiles and the French SCALP. 

The attack appeared to mark the first time the Flamingo was deployed successfully in combat, the Kyiv Post reported, with the bus-size missile having undergone testing and tweaking for about a year. 

The Flamingo is one part of Ukraine’s accelerating domestic military production base, said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Ukraine’s ability to improve on the Flamingo’s targeting and distance — plus its military’s drone advancements, including all-domestic production — have helped push Ukraine on the front foot against Russia after a period of stalemate between 2023 and 2024. 

“For there to be a real impact on the front line, or for there to be a real impact in Crimea, this will have to be measured, I would say, in months, nothing’s going to be automatic,” Coffey said, cautioning that just as Ukraine is racing to innovate, Russia is not stagnant. 

It’s estimated that Russia can produce up to three ballistic missiles a day. It stockpiles them for major salvos against Ukraine every seven to 10 days, he estimated. 

A major attack against Ukraine overnight Wednesday into Thursday killed at least 30 people in the capital, injured dozens and damaged residential buildings. Other Ukrainian cities were hit by Russian missiles and drones, too. 

Ukraine is accelerating development of a ballistic missile interceptor, a dire need in its air defenses as Europe and the U.S. have not provided enough to defend against the onslaught of Russian attacks. 

Zelensky is pleading with the U.S. to permit licenses for the joint production of Patriot interceptors. President Trump has not dismissed Ukraine’s request but has not agreed to it either. 

Coffey argued that European partners need to step up and hand over to Ukraine interceptors that are sitting in storage across the continent. He also pointed out that additional sanctions are needed to close loopholes where Western components are still making their way into Russian weapons — but cautioned even that action would take months to have an effect. 

In the meantime, Ukraine and its allies must prepare for surviving the winter, stockpiling key humanitarian goods like warming tents and generators to combat what is likely to be Russian attacks on Ukrainian electrical infrastructure — a punishing strategy Putin employed last winter. 

“There’s no reason to assume this winter will be any easier,” Coffey said. 

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5953000-putin-russia-ukraine-war-pressure