Kremlin

Wednesday September 14, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 14, 2022

Putin’s Kharkiv disaster is his biggest challenge yet

Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent more than two decades carefully cultivating his domestic political image of a strong foreign policy strategist who can outsmart Western leaders and restore Russia to its former glory.

April 12, 2022

But that image has suffered significant damage in the past few days, as a blistering Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine exposed the inadequacies of Moscow’s master plan and forced Russian troops to retreat.

Experts said the Russian collapse in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region represented the biggest challenge of Putin’s career, and that the Kremlin leader was running out of options.

Moscow has tried to spin the hasty withdrawal as “regrouping”, but in a sign of just how badly things look for Russia, the military has been publicly criticized by a number of high-profile Kremlin loyalists including Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who supplied thousands of fighters to the offensive.

Russia has suffered significant setbacks earlier in the war — for example when it lost its Black Sea fleet flagship Moskva or when it was forced to withdraw from the areas around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

But the current situation could pose a much bigger problem for Putin, Russian political analyst Anton Barbashin said.

March 1, 2022

“The Kyiv withdrawal was framed as a gesture of goodwill, something they’ve had to do to prevent civilian casualties,” he told CNN. “The propaganda component was always focusing on Donbas region as being the top priority, but now that Russian forces are somewhat withdrawing from Kharkiv region and Luhansk region, it would be much more problematic to explain this if Ukraine does in fact, push further and I didn’t see a reason why they wouldn’t.”

The Kremlin on Monday said Putin was aware of the situation on the frontlines, and insisted Russia would achieve all the goals of its “special military operation” — the phrase Moscow is using for its war on Ukraine — to take control of all of Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

But that operation will be made much more difficult by Ukraine’s victories in neighboring Kharkiv. And the setbacks there have ignited criticism and finger pointing among influential Russian military bloggers and personalities in Russian state media.

February 17, 2022

Unusually, even Putin himself has been criticized. On Monday, deputies from 18 municipal districts in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kolpino called for Putin’s resignation, according to a petition with a list of signatures posted on Twitter.

Experts said Putin would now face growing pressure to respond with force. Influential Russian nationalist and pro-war voices are increasingly calling for radical steps, including full mobilization and ramped up strikes against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, some even suggesting the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

“Generally there’s a quite open sense of panic among Russian pro-war analysts and voices,” Barbashin said.

The Kremlin has so far rejected the idea of a mass mobilization and Russia watchers believe it is unlikely that Putin would call for one, because he is aware that such a move would likely prove unpopular and would be seen as an admission that the “special military operation” is, in fact, a war.

Putin signed a decree last month to increase the number of military personnel to 1.15 million, adding 137,000 service personnel, but analysts say it will likely become increasingly difficult for Russia to recruit.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analytical group, pointed out on Sunday that some regional authorities have faced criticism for their push to recruit contract servicemen and volunteers to fight in Ukraine.

The full extent of Ukraine’s recent gains — and its ability to hold onto them — is still unclear. But experts say that if the Ukrainian counteroffensive continues at similar pace, Putin will find it increasingly difficult to present himself as a strong strategist. (CTV)

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

 

Thursday September 1, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday September 1, 2022

Disdained by Putin, Gorbachev walked a tightrope to defend his legacy

Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent his 22 years in power relentlessly hacking down the legacy of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

August 11, 1999

The two rarely met, and Gorbachev, who died Tuesday in Moscow at age 91, cautiously couched his remarks about the Russian leader, even when they weren’t critical. Unlike Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev never requested or received a guarantee of immunity from arrest or prosecution, he said.

Gorbachev’s criticism of Putin was often indirect, as in his 2015 book “The New Russia,” in which he wrote that Putin had taken “advantage” of a flawed constitution drafted on Yeltsin’s watch — for example, by using an imprecise provision on term limits to return to the presidency in 2012.

Friday August 10, 2007

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 10, 2007

Russian bombers resuming Cold War patrols

Russian bombers have resumed Cold War-style long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the United States, top Russian generals said Thursday.

A Russian bomber flew over a U.S. naval base on the Pacific island of Guam on Wednesday and “exchanged smiles” with U.S. pilots who had scrambled to track it, said Major General Pavel Androsov, head of long-range aviation in the Russian Air Force.

President Vladimir Putin has sought to make Russia more assertive. He has increased defense spending and sought to raise morale in the armed forces, which were starved of funding after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The bombers give Russia the capability of making a nuclear strike, even if the nuclear arsenals on its own territory are wiped out.

During the Cold War, Soviet pilots played elaborate airborne games of cat and mouse with Western air forces.

The current state of Russia’s economy, which is booming for the eighth year in a row, has allowed Russia to finance such flights, said Safranchuk of the World Security Institute. (Source: Herald Tribune)

Between 1989 and 1991 Graeme MacKay illustrated and, along with writer Paul Nichols, co-wrote a weekly comic strip, entitled “Alas & Alack”, a satire of current day public figures framed in a medieval setting. It was published in The Fulcrum, the English language student newspaper at the Univesity of Ottawa. In total, 46 strips were created.

Last week I did a cartoon showing Vladimir Putin atop Lenin’s tomb reminiscent of photos we’d see of Soviet leaders during the cold war years. I was inspired to draw it following renewed interest by the Russians in the Arctic from the North Pole to the Mediterranean via the Caucasus. It made me think back, before Boris Yeltsin, to the last time I drew Lenin’s tomb back when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, as he warming up to the west with Glasnost, and implementing political and economic reforms otherwise known as Perestroika. The year was 1989, democracy was spreading throughout Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall had just come down, and I was a student at the University of Ottawa. I was just starting out getting my worked published in the student press, through the campus newspaper called The Fulcrum. I had a cartoon strip called: Alas & Alack.