President Putin’s broadcast shows a leader running out of time and options

Not known for his sense of humour, Vladimir Putin seems to be wanting to help out with a new internet meme using the popular formulation “tell me without telling me”.

In the case of the president of the Russian Federation, his rambling speech to his people was his way of telling them that he was losing the war in Ukraine without actually saying so. The partial mobilisation of perhaps 300,000 reservists, new conscripts and ex-conscripts is a clear enough signal that his supposedly clinical “special military operation” isn’t going as well as he hoped when he launched it in February.

The numbers sound formidable, but as so often in Russian military history, it is the quality, equipment, experience and morale of the armed forces that is the critical weakness. Even the Chechen mercenaries, with their reputation for particular savagery, have proved unreliable in the face of spirited Ukrainian attacks.

Once the West, virtually unanimously, united to arm Kyiv with intelligence and the most advanced of weaponry, and resolved to wage economic war on Russia, the writing was on the wall.

President Putin is losing his war, and his television broadcast merely draws attention to the fact. The Russian people, with whom the West has no quarrel, may have been deceived by their leaders, but they are not stupid. The terrible truth about the casualties, the war crimes and the sheer futility of the campaign is starting to poke through the curtain of Kremlin propaganda.

President Putin is running out of time and options, and he is beginning to sound more desperate with it. One of the few ways he can still take the initiative is to make threats about destroying life on the planet via a nuclear conflagration. He says “I’m not bluffing” – but this is precisely the sort of thing that a foolish bluffer would say.

He has painted himself into a very tight corner. If he carries out his threat, America has promised to destroy his military, and very possibly Mr Putin himself. If he fails to carry out his threat, then those around him and the Russian people will conclude that they are being dragged towards bloody humiliation by one of the world’s great losers.

Only a man as vain and deluded as Vladimir Putin could issue barely disguised threats to use nuclear weapons while simultaneously accusing the West of nuclear blackmail. Terrifying as it all sounds, it is not the first time Mr Putin has raised the stakes, and done so without any follow-through. This time, it has to be said, things are different.

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The bogus referendums being hurriedly organised in the occupied eastern territories of Ukraine are designed to convert the puppet “people’s republics” and other lands into sovereign Russian territory. This is against international law and, more to the point, now makes it impossible for Volodymyr Zelensky to come to any negotiated settlement with Russia. Defiant as he has unflinchingly been, Ukraine’s Churchillian leader always conceded that the war would end one day and with some sort of compromise. President Putin just blew that up – yet another tactical error.

Even Russia’s remaining “candid friends” in the world, President Xi of China and Prime Minister Modi of India, have tried to coax him away from his war, which also threatens a global recession – bad for Chinese and Indian business, and thus the national interest.

Although Russia is an authoritarian police state, dissent and protests can break out, and it cannot be that every figure in politics and the military is so loyal and beholden to their leader that they can ignore the unfolding disaster. Like his troops, Mr Putin is losing ground.