Mark Galeotti

Russia is retreating at speed along the Kharkiv front, leaving behind burnt-out tanks and, even more tellingly, undamaged ones, too. There are television images of locals welcoming Ukrainian forces and accounts from eyewitnesses on the spot – but none of that has made it into Russian state media. As the Kremlin struggles to find some way of spinning the unspinnable, this will affect not just its public credibility but also elite unity. The Russian defence ministry is talking about a 'regrouping' of its units. State TV is extolling the 'exploits' of its gallant soldiers. Government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, recounting an alleged victory, trips itself up by placing the action deep into formerly Russian-held territory.

What do Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, the chairman of the BBC, Piers Morgan, and, er, me, have in common? The answer is that we’ve all been banned from Russia. For some of us, that’s a blow. For others, an irrelevance. But for all of us, it’s a strange accolade: somehow Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin thinks we’re significant, dangerous or hostile enough to need to be kept out at all costs. What level of insecurity does it take to worry that the screen Zoolander and Harvey Milk, respectively, represent a threat to the stability and integrity of the Russian Federation?

In my travels when I was still persona grata in Russia, I never got the sense that their windows were unduly flimsy or inviting. Nonetheless, the tally of Russians and Russian-connected individuals who have met their end by jumping or falling out of windows is such that it has become a rather tacky and tasteless meme. Most recently, Ravil Maganov, chair of the Lukoil conglomerate died after falling out of a window in Moscow on Thursday. This follows on the heels of the death in Washington DC of Dan Rapoport, an American businessman who used to be active in Russia before leaving and becoming a critic of the regime. He apparently jumped from an apartment building in Georgetown.

Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by what was still then the Soviet Union in its late years of sclerosis, when one moribund geriatric at the top of the system succeeded another (the dark joke at the time went as follows: a KGB guard stopped someone at one of the state funerals and asked him if he had a pass – ‘oh,’ came the reply, ‘I’ve got a season ticket’). But my early years as a Russia-watcher were during his time as General Secretary, and if my seniors had become used to the idea that the USSR was a stagnant, unchanging police state, for us, the thought that there could be change, even change for the good, was baked into our assumptions.

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart.  Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the defence, and imaginative and impassioned in the attack.

Car bombs used to be a fixture of gangland feuds in 1990s Russia but have since fallen out of fashion. This makes it all the more striking when, as happened on Saturday night, such a device rips through a car just outside Moscow, killing Darya Dugina, daughter of the controversial nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. She was a prominent figure in her own right, a journalist working for an outfit Washington says is owned by Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin – under sanctions in the West for being the godfather of both the Wagner mercenary group and the infamous social media ‘troll farms’ – who had been a cheerleader for the war in Ukraine.

Another day, another Russian arms depot up in smoke. The latest attack, this time on an ammunition storage site near Mayskoye on the Crimean peninsula, highlights three particular aspects of this phase of the war, and the degree to which Kyiv is adapting quicker and more effectively than Moscow. The first is that the long-heralded Ukrainian counter-attack is, so far, less about a melee on the ground and more about a methodical attempt to target Russian supply lines. Until now, this has been through missile and rocket strikes, although Moscow’s claim that the Mayskoye attack was carried out by ‘saboteurs’ would – if true – represent an interesting new approach.

For most Russians, the brutal realities of Vladimir Putin's 'special military operation' have not really struck home. Ukraine's attack on the Saki airbase near Novofedorivka in western Crimea on Tuesday begins to change all that, marking a new stage of the war, one with both dangers and opportunities for Kyiv. The Kremlin’s spin doctors tried to claim that the explosions filmed by horrified Russian holidaymakers were caused by an ammunition fire. However, as videos began going viral on Russian social media, there was no question in the posters' minds but that this was an attack. They voted with their feet, or at least their wheels, and the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the mainland became one long traffic jam as panicked holidaymakers fled the peninsula.

Could a general of the SBU, the security service of Ukraine, really have helped Russia take the city of Kherson? Could a colonel have tipped off the Russians as to where the Ukrainians had lain mines north of Crimea? The Ukrainian government certainly appears to believe that fifth columnists within the SBU have been Moscow’s secret weapon in this war – this week Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of the agency (and his childhood friend) Ivan Bakanov, along with the country’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova.

Apparently, if Vladimir Putin had been a woman, everything would be just tickety-boo. Speaking to German TV, Boris Johnson has said that Putin is the ‘perfect example of toxic masculinity’ and that had he been a women – ‘which he obviously isn’t’, Boris felt the need to clarify – then ‘I really don’t think he would’ve embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has.

When General Alexander Dvornikov was made overall commander of Russia’s forces in April, it looked as if the amateurishness and incoordination of the early stage of the Ukraine war might be being addressed. Now, though, Dvornikov is not around, and a new commander may shape a savage new phase of operations. In recent days, the Russian defence ministry announced that Colonel General Alexander Lapin was in command of the Central Group of Forces in Ukraine, while General Sergei Surovikin was heading the Southern Group of Forces during the invasion. Of Dvornikov, who has not been seen for weeks, there was no mention, and the British Ministry of Defence suggests he has been removed from his post.

Putin has a penchant for history, but only insofar it flatters him and his views. Last year, he gifted the world a 5,000 essay that essentially pre-justified his invasion of Ukraine with amateurish fantasy history, and now he is comparing himself with Tsar Peter the Great. It is not a comparison that fits or flatters. Peter the Great is one of the, well, greats of the Russian historical pantheon. He ruled from the late 17th to the early 18th century, and in that time became the first tsar to travel in Europe, built a new capital at St Petersburg, and was both founder of the Russian navy and victor, on points, of the 20-year Great Northern War against the Swedish Empire, leaving Russia a dominant Baltic power.