Putin remains silent on Kherson withdrawal order

Many Russian cheerleaders of Ukraine's invasion on Wednesday presented the Defense Minister's order to withdraw from the city of Kherson as a monumental defeat - the most devastating of Moscow, according to one of them, since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The announced retirement crystallizes the failures of the war effort of President Vladimir V. Putin. It would be a humiliating loss for the largest Ukrainian city that Russia captured in its nine-month invasion, just weeks after Mr Putin declared it an irrevocable part of Russia in a bombastic celebration on Red Square.

But analysts who closely follow Mr. Putin saw the order as a reminder of Mr. Putin's willingness to make tactical concessions in what he sees as a full-scale conflict with the West which, according to people who know him, he believes he can still win.

" This confirms, in my opinion, how pragmatic Putin is,” Tatiana Stanovaya, an analyst who studies Mr. Putin for her political analysis firm R.Politik, said in a telephone interview. "He's not as crazy as we thought."

Mr. Putin himself has remained silent on the issue, allowing his officials to speak. Instead, Mr Putin visited a neurological hospital and spoke at an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of Russia's National Institute of Public Health, praising it for its fight against the coronavirus and its support for care of "our heroes" in Ukraine.

The announced retirement came a week after Mr Putin agreed to join the deal allowing the shipment of Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea, reversing course after Russia threatened to block it in retaliation for a drone attack on Russia's Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Crimea which it attributed to Ukraine, but that Kyiv denied.

And it comes as Kremlin insiders increasingly speculate about the possibility of a ceasefire deal with Ukraine and highlighting reports in Western media that Washington was encouraging Kyiv to be open to talks.

"There is a certain logic here", Andrei Kortunov, director general of th The Russian Council for International Affairs, an organization of research close to the Russian government, said about the order to withdraw from the western bank of the Dnipro river.

Moving to the river's eastern bank more defensible , Kortunov said, the Russian military was seeking to enable what he described as the Kremlin's top short-term priority: a "stabilization, fixation" of the front line.

But Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst and director of Rochan Consulting, based in Gdansk, Poland, said the motives behind the announcement were puzzling. “From a military point of view, such an announcement makes no sense unless there is a second bottom to the story,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

During a retreat, an army would typically seek to maintain the appearance of a strong defense while retreating in secret. Yet the Russian army had also publicly announced withdrawals from the north of the capital, Kyiv, in the spring and from the northeast of the Kharkiv region at the end of the summer, after being defeated by Ukrainian troops.< /p>

"You have to give it to them," Mr. Muzyka said. "They are consistent."

The militant rhetoric emanated from Moscow just a few weeks ago, when the Kremlin's annexation of four Ukrainian regions it did not control only partially - including the Kherson region - emerged to signal a major escalation of the war and perhaps a prelude to the use of nuclear weapons.

But since then Mr Putin has reiterated his nuclear rhetoric, and on Wednesday some of Russia's most influential pro-war voices voiced support for the Kherson pullout. difficult but fair choice between senseless sacrifices for the...