Russian nationalist commentators and state media war correspondents praised Monday’s attack as a fitting and long-awaited response to Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in the northeast and south and an attack over the weekend on a key bridge between Russia and Crimea, the prized Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed in 2014. Many argued, however, that Moscow must maintain Monday’s missile rampage to win the war now. Some analysts have argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin is becoming hostage to his own supporters’ views on how the campaign in Ukraine should play out. “Putin’s initiative is weakening and more dependent on circumstances and those who are forging ‘victory’ (in Ukraine) for him,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the independent think tank R.Politik, wrote in an online comment on Monday . . Putin’s supporters have been calling for drastic steps on the Ukrainian battlefield for weeks. Those calls intensified over the weekend, shortly after the explosion on the Kerch bridge connecting Crimea with Russia shocked the world. The bridge, the longest in Europe, is a prominent symbol of Russian military power and was opened by Putin himself in 2018.
