This may be the CIA game plan or Putin’s loosening of rein over his people, but there are a few faint cracks are visible emerging in the facade of his rule, one year after the Ukraine invasion.

The reasons are innumerous. Not only the emptying national treasury or international bars and bans but also the human angle is dominating people going against the war.

Families of the Russian soldiers also do not want their men to die in war uselessly. On the other hand, many Ukrainian parents are fighting to get their children back from Russian camps.

There is one viral video showing a Russian prisoner’s chilling final message to his wife after fighting in Ukraine. There is also one video released by the Ukrainian forces showing a powerful explosion they said resulted from an attack that destroyed a Russian multiple rocket launcher.

Alexey Navalny, Russian opposition leader, is known for a phrase, “the wonderful Russia of the future.” This imaginary utopia is certainly a picture of Russia without President Vladimir Putin. But being realistic, just one year with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has gone back to a repressive and dark past.

From Feb 2022 onwards till Feb 2023 now on in the last twelve months, Putin’s government has been busy crushing the remnants of Russia’s civil society. Putin has presided over his country’s first military mobilization since World War second.

Putin’s Political opponents like Navalny, are silent now. Most of them are either in prison or out of the country. And Putin has made it clear that he seeks to reassert Russia as an empire. Moreover in his dream Russian empire, there is no place for Ukraine as an independent state.

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The war in Ukraine supported the period of High Putinism. It was Putin’s decade of Russia till now which began with Putin’s controversial return to the presidency in the year 2012. Russia was clear about its intentions and had annexed the Crimean Peninsula in the year 2014 itself and also backed armed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region.That was the prelude to war on Ukraine.