“They will hang me,” Putin reportedly said to a group of close confidants, expressing his fear of public backlash to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Increasingly, the Russian president’s facade of strength appears to be cracking: from the firing of the country’s top economist following a critical speech on the wartime economy, to Putin’s diminished appearance alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, to growing pushback from Russian pro-war bloggers against official Kremlin claims of battlefield gains.