Moscow officials are urging Vladimir Putin to step down from power

More Russian officials are urging Vladimir Putin to leave the Kremlin as Moscow suffered another series of humiliating defeats in Ukraine this weekend.

Just a day after several city MPs in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg called on the State Duma to try the Russian leader for treason, their counterparts in Moscow joined in calling for his resignation because his views were “hopelessly outdated.”

The open letter to Putin from local MPs in the Russian capital’s Lomonosovsky district began by what appeared to be trying to gently let him down, telling him he had “good reforms” in his first and part of his second term .

But then “everything went wrong,” said the deputies.

“The rhetoric you and your subordinates use has long been riddled with intolerance and aggression, which in the end effectively thrown our country back into the Cold War era. Russia is feared and hated again, we are once again threatening the whole world with nuclear weapons,” the letter said.

“We ask you to resign from your post, as your views and model of government are hopelessly outdated and hinder the development of Russia and its human potential,” the deputies concluded.

Though they didn’t mention the war against Ukraine, their request came as Putin’s deranged “military special operation” next door took a spectacular nosedive as thousands of Russian forces fled as the Ukrainian military launched a series of surprise counter-offensives, retaking nearly 400 square miles of territory in few days.

Even as Russian defense officials tried to downplay the mass surrender as nothing more than a strategic maneuver, it was clearly not perceived as such by even many of Putin’s most loyal cronies.

The same Russian propagandists who had spent the first six months of the war fretting over a supposedly “inevitable victory” suddenly changed their minds. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, who had repeatedly urged Moscow to mercilessly wipe out Ukraine, suddenly posted a sentimental screed tweeted for unity between the two nations.

“In this situation, the best picture of the future is the overall picture of the past. Our common past, the other day. When everyone was together, when there was Victory Day, when there was a parade, when both Russian and Ukrainian were taught,” she wrote, becoming nostalgic for a time when “wonderful songs in both were sung in another language”.

Even the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, run by Russian military bloggers, had a dramatic shift in mood as Ukraine clinched fresh victories on Saturday: they began openly blaming the military leadership – and Putin himself – for the embarrassing failures.

“Stalin, much as he was a vampire, never deigned to say that we have nothing to lose and that there are no problems,” wrote a pro-Kremlin blogger. “Those who cowardly ran away and ‘withdraw troops’ were the alarmists to him.”