Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly sent shockwaves among his top military generals as he disclosed his plans to carry out a “nuclear evacuation drill” after “moving his family to a safe and secret underground city”.
The Daily Mail quoted a source who revealed that the Russian President is “depressed” and has a character of “often pouring his anger out in those close to him”. “He has no deep conversations with almost anyone, and limited contact even with his children – not only his [adult] daughters but also his [undisclosed] children with [Olympic gold medal winning gymnast, 38] Alina Kabaeva,” the source said.
The move to initiate a “nuclear evacuation” of his family amid conflict with Ukraine has raised the fears of a beginning of a nuclear war. The secret location is not just a bunker, but a huge underground city, said a Russian expert.
Earlier, reports said that Putin had moved unidentified members of his immediate family either to a plush mountain villa in neutral Switzerland, or to a hi-tech underground bunker in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.
The Daily Mail further quoted a source who claimed that Putin is “suffering from multiple and serious medical problems”.
Previously, a BBC report noted, “In 2014, Angela Merkel reportedly told President Obama that Mr Putin was living ‘in another world’. President Macron meanwhile when he sat down with Mr Putin recently, was reported to have found the Russian leader ‘more rigid, more isolated’ compared with previous encounters,” BBC report noted.
Putin’s forces are waging Russia’s largest, most complex combined military campaign since taking Berlin in 1945. His initial objective, which he announced in a television address on Feb. 24 as the invasion began, was to demilitarize Ukraine and save its people from neo-Nazis” a false description of Ukraine’s government, which is led by a Jewish president. Fatefully, Putin underestimated the national pride and battlefield skills that Ukrainians have built up over the past eight years of battling Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
The signs are abundant of how Ukraine frustrated Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a swift victory and how Russia’s military proved far from ready for the fight. A truck carrying Russian troops crashes, its doors blown open by a rocket-propelled grenade. Foreign-supplied drones target Russian command posts. Orthodox priests in trailing vestments parade Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag in defiance of their Russian captors in the occupied city of Berdyansk. Russia has lost hundreds of tanks, many left charred or abandoned along the roads, and its death toll is on a pace to outstrip that of the country’s previous military campaigns in recent years.
Yet more than three weeks into the war, with Putin’s initial aim of an easy change in government in Kyiv long gone, Russia’s military still has a strong hand. With their greater might and stockpile of city-flattening munitions, Russian forces can fight on for whatever the Russian president may plan next, whether leveraging a negotiated settlement or brute destruction, military analysts say.
Despite all the determination of Ukraine’s people, all the losses among Russia’s forces and all the errors of Kremlin leaders, there is no sign that the war will soon be over. Even if Putin fails to take control of his neighbour, he can keep up the punishing attacks on its cities and people. Ukraine’s president said Russia is trying to starve Ukraine’s cities into submission and that Putin is deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.” His instinct will be always to double down because he’s got himself into a dreadful mess, a huge strategic blunder, said Michael Clarke, former head of the British-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank. And I don’t think it’s in his character to try to retrieve that, except by carrying on, going forward, he said.
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