Russian President Vladimir Putin is coming under rare public criticism at home, a significant signal of how the pressures from the more than four-year war in Ukraine are hurting the country.
Fuel shortages and rising inflation, high-profile attacks against Russian energy infrastructure and cities, and mounting military casualties are prompting prominent figures to start pinning the blame on Putin.
“It is a crisis,” said Vladimir Milov, a Russian economist in exile who served as deputy minister of energy in 2002. “What we are seeing right now is an extreme acceleration of public admissions that we are in trouble.”
German Gref, head of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, is one of the most high-profile elites in Russia to issue blunt criticism calling for the war to end.
“I don’t think there’s a single person who isn’t concerned about anything other than a rapid end of hostilities, that’s clear,” he reportedly said on Russian state TV earlier this week, responding to overwhelming negative economic trends.