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.




President Trump on Friday issued a “fierce rebuke” of communism as part of his Independence Day kickoff speech, injecting partisan rancor into remarks commemorating America’s 250th birthday with Mount Rushmore as the backdrop.
A United Nations commission this month published a report saying that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children since 7 October 2023, and that it committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the process.
A devastating Russian guided aerial bomb strike tore through the center of Sumy on Friday, killing at least four people, including a child, and injuring dozens of others, Ukrainian officials reported.
A shooting altercation between two groups of young people at a shopping mall in Dearborn, Michigan, left two people dead and a third injured over what is typically the most violent weekend of the year in the US, police said.





























