Widespread disarray is generating rising frustration among Russian special forces as the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine reached the 11-day mark, according to a new report.
Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, was reporting live from Kyiv on Sunday when he told Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd about a lack of coordination and overarching vision among Russian forces that can be traced all the way up to an increasingly irate Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Sources have been telling me, sources that are well connected to the Russian Security Services, that the offensive is not going well, that some special forces, the Russian Spetsnaz, are furious because they have been sent into battle without proper support, and many of them have been killed. They say that the national guard forces and the regular army, the national guard forces include those Chechen units, that two of them are not coordinating on the field. And that the overall battle plan is somewhat disjointed in that it’s partly a plan for war and partly a plan for peacekeeping and so-called de-Nazification of this country. And it has led to a lack of cohesion,” Engel reported.
“A lot of this goes back to the man who’s behind it all, Vladimir Putin, who I’m told is now increasingly isolated, is just taking advice from his inner circle, that there are only about three people who matter right now,” Engel continued. “And that speech, you mentioned it a short while ago, that Putin gave yesterday — bizarre location, speaking at Aeroflot, to a group of flight attendants. He sounded incredibly angry. He sounded detached. He was talking about how the Ukrainians here are machine-gunning people, that they’re driving around in cars packed with explosives, jihadi-style. And he went very deep and repeatedly on this theme that they’re fighting against the Nazis. It was the angriest I’ve ever seen him.”
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In his speech on Saturday, Putin said Western sanctions on Russia “are akin to declaring war” and warned that Ukraine might lose its statehood “if they continue doing what they are doing.” A couple of days earlier, Putin claimed Russia’s military operation was “going to plan.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video posted Sunday, accused Russia of announcing shelling in Ukrainian territory that would amount to “deliberate murder.”
An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainians have left the country during the first 10 days of the invasion, and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said on Sunday that the humanitarian crisis is only going to worsen as the conflict continues. Most of those fleeing are women, children, the elderly, and the disabled as men of fighting age have been mandated to stay in the country.
An estimated 95% of Russia‘s pre-staged combat power has entered Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said Sunday. However, progress with the assault has been slower than Moscow expected, Western intelligence assessments have consistently stated, and the United States and other allied countries are providing the Ukrainians hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance and equipment.
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Still, as a third round of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials is expected to take place Monday, there is trepidation in Kyiv and other parts of the country.
“A second attempt to evacuate civilians from the city of Mariupol by opening up a humanitarian corridor has collapsed, with both sides, both the Russians and the Ukrainians, blaming the other for the breakdown,” Engel reported. “So it means that the people are still trapped in that city, still under fire, and without food, power, water. Here in Kyiv, Russian forces are advancing toward the city. They are making slow advances in the northeast, around the neighborhoods of Irpin and Puscha. And I just spoke with the mayor of Kyiv a short while ago, and he told me that roughly 10,000 people have been killed so far, according to figures that he has, on both sides of the conflict. And I asked him how long he thinks Kyiv can hold out, and he said, frankly, he doesn’t know, but that he believes it can be a long time because the people here have a lot of fighting spirit and they’re not fighting for the will of one man.”
