Ukraine has become a dead end for Vladimir Putin.

The withdrawal from Kherson - which

Kiev is still grasping with pincers for fear of a military trap

- deals the Russian president a humiliating blow whose impact will be felt in Moscow, where he faces the raised swords of the ultra-nationalists who are pressing for an even bloodier escalation of the conflict and the discomfort of a population that has stopped watching the war on television since the generals called their parents and children

to ranks with the mobilization of 300,000 reservists.

An American general yesterday estimated that 100,000 Russian soldiers were wounded or killed

;

corpses that are beginning to weigh too heavily on Russian public opinion (according to the same source, Ukrainian military casualties are around that figure, to which some 40,000 civilians would be added).

Jershon has become

Russia's greatest military victory

that captured the provincial capital in the first days of the war, to the greatest failure it has suffered on the ground.

The square has a

enormous symbolic value

and morale that gives wings to the kyiv offensive -launched on September 29 and which has already reconquered more than 8,000 square kilometers from the invader- at the gates of a difficult winter.

But it also has

a great strategic value to change the course of the war

, as it is a land bridge between the Ukrainian territory and the Crimean peninsula, vital for the supply lines of the Russian army, greatly weakened by the impulse of the offensive by the Government of Volodimir Zelenski.

Jershon was also

one of the illegally annexed Ukrainian regions

in a ceremony that the Kremlin was in charge of celebrating with great fanfare.

However, on Wednesday, the megalomaniacal Russian president gave the spotlight to his Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and his chief general in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin, who were in charge of announcing the withdrawal from the city.

to "save the lives of the soldiers" who defended it.

The ridicule of having lost it raises fears of a response in the form of a large-scale attack from Putin, as he is increasingly cornered.

In another sign of weakness, the Russian leader has ruled out going to the G-20 summit to be held next week in Indonesia and where the Kremlin tenant

does not have the unconditional support of its allies in Beijing and New Delhi

to cushion the frontal clash with Western democracies and especially with the American Joe Biden, who came to ask for his expulsion from the international forum.

Xi Jinping made it clear to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that

China rejects the use of nuclear weapons in Europe.

And the Indian Narendra Modi recently complained about the suffering that developing countries are suffering from a conflict that puts their food and energy security at risk.

Putin now trusts everything to the arrival of a winter that will freeze the kyiv offensive, smear his troops in frozen mud and raise the suffering of civilians to such heights that it undermines both Ukrainian morale and the will of the West to sustain it. .

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