Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Narusova, widow of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, stand at the monument to Anatoly Sobchak during the 20th anniversary of his death in St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020.Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
A prominent Russian senator with close ties to Putin is increasingly critical of the war in Ukraine.
Senator Lyudmila Narusova, whose late husband was a mentor to Putin, has been skeptical of the war from the start.
Their public discontent is a sign of growing chaos in the Kremlin after months without victory.
A prominent Russian senator with close ties to President Vladimir Putin is increasingly and publicly criticizing the ongoing war effort in Ukraine, exemplifying the the growing chaos currently gripping the Kremlin.
Senator Lyudmila Narusova, who is also the widow of Putin’s former political mentor Anatoly Sobchak, recently spoke of her growing frustration with Russia’s 15-month war more than a year after she first expressed his concern about the invasion.
Narusova’s public insults signal a change in the Russian public’s perception of the war after months of heavy Russian casualties in the strategically unimportant city of Bakhmutas well as increasingly public infighting between the Russian military and Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhinwhich has begun to embarrass the country’s defense leaders.
“No one has explained what victory should look like,” Narusova told a Forbes Russia interviewer in an April videoaccording to translation in The Washington Post. “If we think about the goals initially stated,”denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’.“, the entire Ukrainian army must have been destroyed by now.”
Narusova added that Russian soldiers are now facing Ukrainian troops armed by NATO.
“Does that mean we’re demilitarizing NATO?” she asked. “This goal is unattainable.”
Narusova, who was elected to the State Duma in 1995 and has been a member of the Russian Federation Council for decades, was an early skeptic of Putin’s invasion, telling Russian state television that he “did not identify with those representatives of the Russian Federation”. state that they are in favor of the war”, a few days after the start of the conflict, according to The New York Times.
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“I think they themselves don’t know what they’re doing,” Narusova told the independent Dozhd channel in February 2022, per The Times. “They are following orders without thinking.”
Narusova also told the Dozhd outlet that dead Russian soldiers were lying in Ukraine “unburied; stray wild dogs gnawing on bodies that in some cases cannot be identified because they are burned.”
In March 2022, she spoke to the Council of the Russian Federation about the heavy Russian losses and was the only legislator who must abstain from voting on an electronic draft call in the mobilization of the Russian army at the beginning of the year.
Narusova’s criticism is notable given her close connection to Putin, who was a protégé of Narusova’s late husband as well as the rumored godfather of her socialite daughter. Ksenia Sobchak, who has been called the “Paris Hilton of Russia”.
Her husband, Anatoly Sobchak, who was the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg and helped co-author the Constitution of the Russian Federation, mentored two future Russian presidents, Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the current vice president of security Council of the Russian Federation.
Sobchak died in February 2000 shortly after traveling to the city of Kaliningrad to support Putin’s election campaign.
His widow’s public defiance is a sign of this concern is growing among senior Russian officials before Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive. Anna Nemtsova, a correspondent for the Daily Beast who has covered the Putin regime for more than two decades, he wrote in The Post this week that the Ukrainians are successfully shaking up the Kremlin, leaving the country in an unprecedented state of chaos and chaos.
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