Comments by "Vaska Tumir" (@vaska1999) on "St. Petersburg Alert, Bakhmut - Retreat, US chemical provocation, Putin Presidency, Serbia - Kosovo" video.

Bakhmut is/ws THE most heavily defended, entrenched city in Ukraine. The liberation of Mariupol gives a much better idea of how long it would take to get and control Kiev. But, as others have pointed out, Russia isn't interested in taking Kiev at all and will, at most, if provoked by long-range missiles the West might sent to Ukraine, take everything to the Dnieper River, the obvious and natural new border between it and Ukraine. As both Putin and Shoigu intimated just last week, however, it probably won't want to go even as far west as the Dnieper unless further provoked.
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Putin's not "too old" to run -- he's a both physically and mentally robust,and will be only 72 or so in 2024. I'm surprised by your animus against Putin, who single-handedly pulled Russia from the abyss of the 1990s, reigned in the oligarchs, and has presided over an unprecedented flowering of the Russian society. The turn-around his policies have created in the past 20 years has been absolutely astonishing and remains unrivalled in the annals of history -- not only of Russia but of any country ever.
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@LevanGudadze If that were true, I would expect the Russian public opinion and it's support for Putin to reflect that. The fact that his support remains at about 80% suggests otherwise. I also understand from both Western analysts with a strong military background and from the news coming from Serbian volunteers who've been fighting in Donbass since 2014 and who say that the slow pace is absolutely being imposed by the General Staff (they report that the fighting units they're in as well as other fighting units they're familiar with have been told to stand down over and over again precisely at the point when they were about to completely overtake a specific Ukrainian position) that the reason Russia is going so slow is a deliberate policy, one aim of which is to drain NATO of its ammunition, something it's certainly achieving. I have no doubt that Putin and the rest of the government should finally start doing something real and effective to root out corruption from Russian state institutions, though, and can barely imagine how frustrating it must be that they seem to have no inclination for it. Such a problem can definitely sabotage Russia's success in any number and kind of endeavours.
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