Just a day after several municipal deputies in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg called on the State Duma to try the Russian leader for treason, their colleagues in Moscow joined in and called for him to resign because his views are “hopelessly outdated.” The open letter to Putin from the municipal deputies of the Russian capital’s Lomonosov district appeared to try to gently put him down, telling him that he had “good reforms” in his first term and part of his second. But then “everything went wrong,” the deputies said. “The rhetoric you and your subordinates have been using has been full of bigotry and aggression for a long time, which has finally pushed our country back into the Cold War era. Russia is once again feared and hated, once again we threaten the entire world with nuclear weapons,” the letter said. “We ask you to be relieved of your position due to the fact that your views and your model of governance are hopelessly outdated and hinder the development of Russia and its human potential,” the MPs said in closing. While they made no mention of the war against Ukraine, their call came as Putin’s troubled “special military operation” next door went into spectacular turmoil, with thousands of Russian forces fleeing as Ukraine’s military launched a series of surprise counterattacks and claimed nearly 400 square miles of territory in a few days. Although Russian defense officials tried to downplay the mass surrender as nothing more than a strategic maneuver, it clearly wasn’t seen that way even by many of Putin’s staunchest friends. The same Russian propagandists who had spent the first six months of the war beating their chests about a supposed “inevitable victory” suddenly changed their tune. Margarita Simonyan, the RT editor who had repeatedly called on Moscow to ruthlessly wipe out Ukraine, suddenly posted an emotional parody on Twitter calling for unity between the two nations. “In this situation, the best picture of the future is the total picture of the past. Our common past, the recent. When they were all together, when Victory Day was held, when there was a parade, when both Russian and Ukrainian were taught,” he wrote, longing for the time when “they sang wonderful songs in both languages.” Even pro-Kremlin Telegram channels run by Russian military bloggers had a dramatic change of tone as Ukraine scored new victories on Saturday: They began openly criticizing the military leadership — and Putin personally — for the embarrassing failures. “Stalin, vampire as he was, never stooped to it and said how we lost nothing and there are no problems,” wrote one pro-Kremlin blogger. “To him, those who cowardly flee and ‘withdraw the troops’ were the alarms.”
