Putin Faces A Coup After Failing To Seize Donbas Region: UK War Expert

Russian President Vladimir Putin will be removed in a coup after the defeat of his army in Ukraine, according to security expert Dr. Mike Martin, a research fellow at King's College London, John Varga reported for the UK’s Daily Express.

Photo Insert: Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to capture Donbas go way back to 2014

Martin said Putin launched a new offensive in Ukraine's east to cover up for his failure to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and now he talks of “liberating” the Donbas region, which he had recognized earlier as the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russian forces have yet to make any significant breakthroughs and continue to suffer heavy casualties.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said local forces had inflicted "colossal losses" on the Russian invaders in the Battle of the Donbas.

Martin said: "UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has stated that the UK strategic aim is to evict Russian forces from Ukraine (including Crimea, so back to pre-2014 borders.) She also said it would take 10 years but she’s wrong about that: Russian forces will collapse before that, and we’ll see a coup."

He argued that the Russians had blown their chance of winning the Battle for the Donbas by failing to reconstitute their forces properly and by applying outdated World War II tactics.

"As expected, the Russians have sort of fizzled. They pulled all of these mauled units out of Kyiv and then tried to reconstitute them for combat in the East. This is pretty hard and these new units would have been bruised and damaged from the Battle for Kyiv.”

"The Russians really had one chance - to build these units up - to build up a reserve, and then try to do some bold maneuver - and surround the Ukrainians in the East. The reason that was their one chance is they didn’t have anywhere near the 3:1 attackers to defenders ratio that you need, and so clever maneuvering was the only option they had. The Russians needed to clout not dribble. Unfortunately, they dribbled by feeding these reconstituted units piecemeal into the front line - trying to fight a kind of attritional battle against the Ukrainians,” Martin concluded.

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