DAILY MAIL
Vladimir Putin is leading Russia to defeat and humiliation in Ukraine, according to one of Moscow’s most respected military figures, who also blames the President for uniting the West with his disastrous invasion.
Retired army colonel-general Leonid Ivashov had called for the president’s resignation a year ago before the war started over a ‘criminal’ policy in ‘provoking’ an ‘artificial’ conflict, foreseeing it would trigger disaster.
Now he says the carnage across the border is worse than he imagined.
Ivashov, chairman of the independent All-Russian Officers’ Assembly and a former top aide to a famous Soviet defence minister, lambasted Putin, declaring: ‘We did not expect such a series of mistakes, wrong actions during this military operation.’
‘What happened in the end? Basically what we expected, but much worse,’ said the general, a key figure in the Soviet-era Red Army and later the Russian military, in an interview with Republic independent media.