Putin Confronts Dual Threats: Internal and External.
Six 30-minute videos prepared by Ukraine’s UATV Freedom channel reveal that the Ukraine war is sparking a potential second front of secessionist movements across Russia’s republics, which are by area, the world’s largest nation. The videos show speakers appealing to their various countrymen to defect from the Russian Army and to come home and fight for independence of their indigenous homelands. The radical rhetoric is prompted by an unpopular draft that targets national and religious minorities, a demographic shift where Russians have fallen to minority status in many republics, the feeling that resource-rich republics subsidize Moscow, and the spreading belief that Ukraine’s resistance to Russia offers the best chance in a century for Russia’s myriad republics to win independence.