President’s admission highlights Moscow’s growing acceptance that invasion is not going to plan
Vladimir Putin has made a rare admission of his country’s military challenges in the 10-month-old war in Ukraine as Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited a key city in eastern Ukraine that Moscow has failed to capture despite months of relentless shelling.
In a video message addressed to Russia’s security services, Putin said the situation in the four Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions was “extremely complicated”, and urged security agencies to intensify their efforts to identify “traitors, spies and diversionists”.
