As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership

Military losses have mounted, progress has slowed, and a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war.

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The failures of Mr. Putin’s campaign are apparent in the striking number of  [generals] believed to have been killed in the fighting.

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“In modern warfare, you don’t have a lot of generals getting knocked off,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
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The lack of progress is so apparent that a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war — even as Russian propaganda claims that the slog is a consequence of the military’s care to avoid harming civilians. Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said.
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Instead, Ukraine fought back. Nearly a month has passed, and Russian troops appear bogged down in the face of relentless attacks from a much weaker, though far more maneuverable, Ukrainian military.

“There was probably the hope that they wouldn’t resist so intensely,” Yevgeny Buzhinsky, ​​a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian state television commentator, said of Ukraine’s forces. “They were expected to be more reasonable.”😂

 
As if responding to criticism, Putin has said repeatedly in his public comments about the war that it is going “according to plan.”

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” 😂countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”

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The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services. The top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr. Soldatov said. Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who vacations with Mr. Putin and has been spoken of as a potential presidential successor, has suffered a loss of standing, according to Soldatov’s sources.

Soldatov’s claims could not be independently verified, and some independent experts have challenged them. But Mr. Shoigu has not been shown meeting with Mr. Putin in person since Feb. 27, when he and his top military commander, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, sat at the end of a long table as Mr. Putin, on the opposite end, ordered them to place Russia’s nuclear forces at a higher level of readiness.

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Throughout Ukraine, Russian forces have now largely stalled. But analysts caution that the military setbacks will not deter Mr. Putin — who has cast the war at home as an existential one for Russia, and is increasingly signaling to the Russian public to prepare for a long fight.

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“The Russian leadership can’t lose,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “No matter what, they will need to end this whole story with some kind of victory.”

I believe that those last two paragraphs state the case plainly. Now I don't know about the Times' lede: "Dissent Brews". The article didn't really bear that out.