Putin’s army ‘on brink of collapse’ after Russia loses city, says ex-army chief

2022-10-03

Vladimir Putin's army is on the brink of collapse after losing another key city to Ukraine's counteroffensive, according to retired US Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster.

On Saturday (October 1) Ukrainian forces swept into the city of Lyman, in the east of the country, which Russia had been using as a logistics hub.

The Russian Defence Ministry announced that it had withdrawn troops from the area later that day. The statement read: "In connection with the creation of a threat of encirclement, allied troops were withdrawn from the settlement of [Lyman] to more advantageous lines."

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Some 5,000 Ukrainian troops were reported to have surrounded the city.

To make matters more embarrassing for Russia's blundering tyrant, the defeat came just one day after Putin had illegally annexed the Donetsk region where Lyman is located.

According to McMaster, the loss of Lyman could quite easily turn into a "cascading series of defeats of Russian forces".

Appearing on CBS show Face the Nation, he said: "What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine, a moral collapse. I think they must really be at a breaking point.

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"If you look at just the numbers of casualties, the vast area that they're trying to defend, and now, of course, Russia is trying to mobilise conscripts and send them to the front untrained.

"I think it's very important to also understand that these forces that are in full retreat, now out of Lyman, were really the first round of mobilisation.

"Remember when Putin was trying to recruit more and more people with paying about three-times the average wages to get so-called volunteers to go forward, those forces were hastily trained, thrown into that front, and these are the forces that are collapsing just right now."

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