Putin on brink as army accuses Kremlin of ‘carnage and betrayal’ in Ukraine | World | News

Vladimir Putin has been accused of “betrayal” and deliberately causing “carnage” in his army by a furious Russian soldier. The Kremlin’s troops have struggled to achieve any significant breakthroughs on the frontlines, after almost four years of grinding war.

Ferocious battles continue to rage for control of key cities such as Kupyansk and Pokrovsk, with Ukrainian troops stubbornly digging in. The Russians have suffered horrific casualties, with over one million soldiers killed or injured since February 2022. Yet still, Putin‘s army has failed to take full control of one of its key objectives – the Donbas region in Ukraine‘s east.

Kyiv’s forces still controls around one quarter of Donetsk – one of the two provinces (Luhansk being the other) that make up the region.

In 2025, Russia‘s military managed to take territory amounting to just 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s 603,550 square kilometres, according to Kyiv’s army chief Oleksandr Syrskii.

However, even these incremental gains have come at a high human cost, with almost 420,000 Russians killed and wounded in the process.

The unabated slaughter on the battlefields and the lack of real progress has provoked a furious backlash from bitter Russian nationalists. Ivan Otrakovsky, the former head of the Orthodox Christian movement Holy Rus, accused Putin and his government of “treason” and of deliberately sabotaging the war effort.

In a furious rant during a podcast, the ultra-nationalist said: “It’s not the generals who are to blame nor the Ministry of Defence.

“It’s the top management. They’re all political wheeler-dealers. All of this, the betrayal and all of it, was planned from the outset.

“Initially they didn’t want victory, but carnage. Millions killed. Do you get what’s going on? Initially we did not achieve a strategic victory, because they did not need it. On the contrary they undermined it in every way possible, despite the courage and heroism of our soldiers and officers.

“And now for a long time they have been blurring our strategic victory with tactical victories. With huge losses among the personnel. I’m only speaking as a soldier, that’s all.

“If they wanted to reunite the Russian world or Holy Rus, they would have done so back in 2014. I’m telling you the local residents themselves raised Russian flags. It was necessary to provide a little assistance.

“And at that time they just shut everything down. They killed the people’s commanders of Donbas, signed the Minsk agreements – consciously committing treason.”