03/05/2023
Faced with the prospect of a humiliating climb-down, the Russian president on Wednesday sought to escalate the war by announcing a partial mobilization of Russia’s reservists, and threatened Ukraine and its allies with atomic annihilation. At the very least, that’s an open admission that things have been going very badly and, for all his bravura, Putin will now need to tread carefully in sending men from safe lives in Russia to go and die in trenches in Ukraine.