John Sweeney reports:

I’d heard reports that the Russian Army was not just stalled but that here, on this, the eastern claw of its pincer attack on Kyiv, it was going backward.

“Have the Russians moved?”

“No,” says Denis. “They are staying in the same place, neither moving forward or back.”

“How are they?”

“The villagers say that they are begging for food. They’re so hungry, they come to the villagers and ask for something to eat. The villagers say they are not aggressive. Their commanders want them to fight, to be harsh. But they are too busy asking for scraps to eat.”

So that bit of my reporting was on the money. The other day for New Lines I retold a Reuters story from 2011 that a Russian Army officer was sacked after complaining his boys were fed dog food in tins labeled “prime quality beef.”

The dog food army may not be going backward, but it is not going forward, either. It is more worried about what’s for dinner than besieging Kyiv, and that is not good news for Vladimir Putin.

Nor would the president of Russia fancy face time with Cmdr. Muslim Chiberloevsky. He is fighting against the Russian Army. He has been doing it for a while, since 1991, he tells me in a Georgian restaurant in Kyiv. He’s the leader of a Chechen brigade fighting with the Ukrainians and for a free and independent Chechnya. I ask him what he thinks of Putin’s pet Chechen, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The commander’s stern face grows another inch of ice while Eugene translates.

“Kadyrov is not Chechen. He is a traitor.” [Continue reading…]