Putin’s Male Fragility

PREVIEW VERSION

Start a free 7 day trial to unlock unlimited access to Puck.

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!

How quickly things can change in a week. Last Wednesday, Vladimir Putin announced both a “partial mobilization” in Russia and sham referenda in Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia provinces. Today, we see the results of both. At least 200,000 Russian men have fled the draft in less than a week, though the real number is likely far, far higher. The Ukrainian regions, where “voting” was supervised by men with machine guns and where Russian occupation officials encouraged 13 to 17 year olds to vote to boost turnout, returned North Korean levels of support for joining the Russian Federation. (Results ranged between 97 and 98 percent.)

Putin, and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, also threatened the world with nuclear weapons should Russia’s territorial sovereignty be infringed. (Note: in their minds, that now includes...

Can’t see the full story?

You're receiving the free version of Tomorrow Will Be Worse at . For full access to Puck, and to each of my colleagues, you can
subscribe here.

Learn More

Putin’s Male Fragility

After seven months, the war has finally come home to Russia as Vladimir Putin desperately conscripts more than one million male soldiers to fight back the surging Ukrainian forces. Domestically, his draft has led to a stampede at the border, a mass exodus, and the growing sense that Putin has blown it.

JULIA IOFFE

On September 21, seven months after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the war finally came home to the Russian people. For seven months, it was mostly Ukrainians who lived with the war that Putin had unleashed. They felt its effects daily, fleeing their homes or dying in them as Russian missiles rained down, killing as many as 30,000 Ukrainian civilians. In the meantime, Russians, especially those living in Moscow and St. Petersburg, could pretend the war existed only on state TV. All summer long, the party didn’t stop. Restaurants were full, as were the parks and clubs and theaters. Sure, there were sanctions, but Russians with the means to do so shopped and traveled and life mostly went on, undisturbed.

Then on September 21, after the stunning success of two Ukrainian counter-offensives, Vladimir Putin announced what he called a...

Keep Reading with a Free Trial