RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has long posed as a “strongman”.
He likes to be photographed stalking topless with a rifle in hand. Wrestling with sedated tigers.
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Or walking with Photoshopped bears.
In reality he is no strongman, but a coward.
He has spent the past two years cowering in his hideous Kremlin state rooms refusing to see anybody because he is so scared of Covid.
No wonder when he finally allowed an audience to be near him — as he seemed to do with a group of air hostesses this week — it was met with cries of fakery.
But, while Putin will hardly go near another human being, he expects Russian soldiers, including conscripts, to commit war crimes in his name.
As some of the pitiful last messages home from young soldiers have shown, they have been sent into a hellhole.
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Their president lied that Ukraine was a Nazi state that needed liberating by Russian forces.
In fact, the soldiers have found themselves shelling and fighting an innocent population, who have done them no harm.
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The Russian soldiers have faced extraordinarily brave Ukrainian resistance.
Because Ukraine rightly regards them as conquerors, not liberators.
Of course, inside Russia Putin continues to lie to his people. But he knows how fragile these lies are.
Why else would the Kremlin have barred the Russian population’s access to social media?
Why would he have taken down platforms such as Facebook?
Why would he have closed the few remaining organs of opinion in the country that could be critical of him?
And why would he have threatened his citizens with 15 years in jail if they say anything even slightly critical of his war?
Partly because this war is not going well for Mad Vlad.
He has sent his army into a war that is unwinnable in the long term.
He sent them in with faulty equipment. Not least with faulty communications equipment.
Putin made a great boast in recent years about his army’s new “unbreakable” comms network that would keep their operations secret.
He spent billions on the encrypted system but it failed.
HOW FRAGILE THESE LIES ARE
Most likely because, like everything else in Russia, the money will have gone in kickbacks and bribes.
This is what corrupt states are like.
And one result is that the Russian army is now bogged down by logistical problems in Ukraine, having to make calls back to Moscow on Ukrainian phone lines.
That is one reason why this week the Ukrainians managed to locate and kill one of Putin’s top generals.
Another general died as he tried to unclog the fuel supply problem at the head of a Russian convoy stalled on its way to Kyiv.
Putin expects exceptional bravery from his generals and soldiers.
And he has chosen to send Chechen fighters into Ukraine to act as barbarians.
All the time, Putin has tried to whip up his populace at home.
One of the latest indicators of this is the emergence of the “Z” sign.
It is becoming a Russian swastika, a badge of dishonour.
No one can agree on what it literally stands for — some say it is “Za pobedy” (for victory) while another school of thought is that it means Zapad (West).
There are other interpretations.
OVERTONES OF THE SWASTIKA
What we can all agree on is that it has all the sinister overtones of the swastika, the symbol the Nazis stole from Hindusim as their emblem for the Aryan race.
The world first saw Putin’s “Z” daubed on the side of the tanks rolling into Ukraine — but now it is visible in Russian towns and cities, too.
Civilians, deluded by their leader’s lies, have put the emblem on their cars.
One gymnast, Ivan Kuliak, 20, even had it on his outfit on the podium after wining a bronze medal at the Doha World Cup.
Incidentally, the baby-faced fool was standing next to the winner of the event, Ukrainian Illia Kovtun.
But sickest of all, the authorities got terminally ill children and their parents to leave a hospice and form a “Z” in the snow.
Such people have been press-ganged in the most disgusting way.
Others have actually been brainwashed.
One captured Russian Lieutenant Colonel said as much this week.
He had been tricked into believing that Ukraine was a Nazi power.
Others have admitted they were also duped, and were amazed to discover that they have been living in a state of lies.
Some of them teenage soldiers, terrified and crying for their mums.
COWARD IN CHIEF
Many brave Russians realise they have been had by their Coward in Chief.
Mothers of young men being lined up to fight have been filmed heroically questioning officials who trot out the usual lies.
All the while these officials — like Putin — make sure that their own families are safe.
The heroism of Russians who are speaking up can hardly be stressed enough. The price they will pay is terrible.
In a single day recently it was reported (though not in Russia, of course) that 4,300 Russian citizens were arrested in 53 cities for opposing the war.
They include a female pensioner who survived the siege of Leningrad.
These people will be treated brutally, but they are heroes.
As are the people of Ukraine who have taken up arms to defend their country against this illegal and unprovoked invasion.
One person who is nowhere? Putin.
The man who spent his life posing as a strongman is holed up in the Kremlin or a safe house, throwing away countless lives while wretchedly trying to protect his own.
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