Vladimir Putin should “completely dismantle” Volodmyr Zelensky’s political “regime” in Ukraine, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev has claimed.
Russian strikes pummelled Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine on Monday, hours after Mr Putin labelled the attack on his prized Kerch Bridge linking Russia to annexed Crimea an “act of terrorism” by Mr Zelensky’s special forces.
At least 11 civilians have been killed and many more injured in Monday’s onslaught – the most wide-ranging by Russia in months – as missiles struck apartment buildings, a children’s play area and civilian bridge, leaving people bandaged and bleeding in the street.
Mr Medvedev, who is now the deputy leader of Russia’s security council, was among hawkish figures in Moscow lauding the devastation, gloating that “the first episode has been played” and warning that more was to follow.
Calling on the Russian president to once again escalate his war on Ukraine, six months after his troops were forced to retreat from Kyiv and narrow their focus to the east, Mr Medvedev claimed that Russia should “aim for the complete dismantling of Ukraine’s political regime”.
The Ukrainian state “in its current configuration with the Nazi political regime will continue to pose a permanent, direct and clear threat to Russia,” said the former president and prime minister, employing the language used by Mr Putin to justify what he calls his “special military operation”.
Immediately after the Kerch Bridge attack, said to have killed three people, hardliners in Moscow called for Mr Putin to elevate the stated nature of his war to a “counterterrorism operation” – a move which could see the Kremlin ban rallies, tighten censorship, introduce travel curbs, and call up even more citizens to fight.
Mr Medvedev, who resigned as prime minister in 2020 and has been somewhat sidelined in recent years, is far from the only Russian figure to call for regime change in Ukraine, notably with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov saying in a July speech that Moscow was “determined” to do so.
He was also not alone in celebrating the devastation wrought across Ukraine on Monday, marking a change of tone from the rare public criticism levelled at Russian top brass in recent weeks after Mr Putin’s military lost of thousands of square miles in Ukraine’s east a series of embarrasing military defeats.
The Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, who lambasted military leaders last week and has long pushed for ramping up strikes, said he was now “100 percent happy”, taunting Mr Zelensky as he said “we warned you that Russia hasn’t even started it in earnest”.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of Moscow’s state-backed RT channel, also praised the strikes, while Andrei Kots, a war correspondent for tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda voiced hope that the attacks represented “a new mode of action to the entire depth of the Ukrainian state until it loses its capacity to function”.
On Saturday, Mr Putin appointed General Sergei Surovikin as the new senior commander of his war effort – a man linked to alleged war crimes and said to have a reputation for “total ruthlessness”. Ukraine’s intelligence chief previously said: “Surovikin knows how to fight with bombers and missiles, that’s what he does.”
Russian political scientist Greg Yudin suggested the renewed bombardment looked “like an act of desperation” which shows “how dependent Putin has recently become on this hawkish part of the military”.
He added: “At this point it is Ukraine who controls the escalation dynamic, Putin is only reacting to it. We are probably heading to a point when there will be no escalatory steps left. This could be the endgame.”
