Revealed: Zelensky's drone blitzkrieg on the 'Russian Amazon' is turning shellshocked public against Putin's war

Published: 23:13, 22 August 2026 | Updated: 23:16, 22 August 2026 Cautiously eyeing her fellow passengers, Anastasia clutched her handbag tighter than usual as she rode on a crowded bus home from her bank's branch in northern Moscow. This 70-year-old pensioner is now regularly withdrawing money because she hears whispers that Vladimir Putin may grab the savings of ordinary people and plough them into his endless war, or use them to prop up his creaking economy. 'I scoffed at my babushka [grandmother] stashing her roubles under her mattress,' said the modestly well-off retired senior civil servant.  'Now I'm doing the same. I am so concerned and, honestly, scared.' This time she withdrew just under £1,000-worth of the Russian currency, as she gradually draws down on her savings account. 'I no longer believe in this war and I'm ashamed of my country.' She is far from alone. Her friends and many others across Russia's 11 time zones are following suit in pulling out their money. This week a report revealed the amount of cash sloshing around inside Russia has risen by £21.3billion this year. Amid new economic challenges for Putin, Ukraine's missile and drone-reach are now deep into the country - and able to cripple vital oil refineries and depots A Moscow Oil Refinery is pictured on fire after a Ukrainian drone attack. It is said Putin is unmoved and shows a lack of empathy for his affected citizens In August, Wildberries online marketplace complex at Koledino in Moscow was engulfed in flames following a drone strike  The wealthy, meanwhile are spiriting their money abroad if they can, with brokerage accounts in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia among the favourite outlets, as Western banks are largely closed to them. These mass withdrawals are causing liquidity problems for Putin's economy and financial sector, already suffering as a result of bad debts following a Kremlin-driven lending boom to ramp up military output. This gathering economic turmoil in Russia, combined with Putin's failing war in Ukraine and a loss of faith in his core and much- repeated pledge to deliver financial and political stability, mean the Russian President is now facing the perfect storm. His predicament was crystallised this week after a senior macroeconomist, Andrei Klepach, 67, bluntly warned the President in a leaked speech to a private business club that he 'will not win' his 'war of attrition' with Ukraine. Klepach dismantled the despot's rationale that if he keeps pressure on Ukraine, it will cave in, handing him victory. 'We have this illusion that everything there will collapse. It has not collapsed and will not collapse,' said Klepach, chief economist at VEB.RF, formerly known as Vnesheconombank, which finances major Putin projects and plays a central role in supporting Russia's war-ravaged economy. He pointed to the level of Western financial support that will prevent this. Technologically and economically, he warned, Russia is 'losing it not only to China and the US. In some respects, we are losing it to Ukraine.' He went further and said Putin was leading Russia into an inevitable explosive social crisis, implicitly likening the conditions to those facing President Mikhail Gorbachev – who resigned in 1991 after his political and economic reforms triggered dramatic economic decline – and, earlier, Tsar Nicholas II.  Pictured: Ukrainian one-way attack drone, the Antonov An-196 Liutyi 'No one expected the February Revolution [in 1917],' he said, pointing out that just weeks before it began, Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin had doubted he would live to witness any revolution. 'The situation in the Soviet Union in 1991 – we had been heading towards it slowly and consistently, and everyone understood that we were heading towards a crisis, but there was no fatal inevitability that the Soviet Union would collapse,' he said. Hours after the leak appeared, Klepach, for decades a highly respected insider, was fired for his sacrilegious analysis. He can only hope he will not now be thrown into a cockroach-infested cell. Yet a year ago no one would dare voice such opinions, suggesting Putin no longer transmits anything like the fear and power that he once did.  Exiled economic analyst Vyacheslav Shiryaev said of the Klepach analysis: 'Putin should already be jumping up from his throne, listening carefully and being horrified.' One dramatic sign of the Russian leader's new vulnerability was an extraordinary U-turn this week concerning a tiny anti-war liberal party called Yabloko (meaning 'Apple' in Russian). The grouping had been allowed initially to stand in September's so-called national election – in truth a mockery of a free poll because, as usual, it will be rigged to give Putin his chosen percentage of the votes, which is likely to be around 70 per cent. Yet Putin's apparatchiks suddenly realised that Yabloko was gaining momentum with its anti-war stance, quadrupling its support in three weeks, and posing a danger as a focal point for dissent over the war. It is rumoured Vladimir Putin may take the savings of ordinary Russian people to fund war - and to prop up his creaking economy So the Supreme Court was wheeled out to ban the party from the ballot paper on spurious grounds of flouting copyright laws and receiving foreign funding. Kremlin insiders made clear this election rigging was on Putin's personal orders. Alexei Chaadaev, 47, a political strategist and author who is a long-time evangelist for the dictator, recently warned the Kremlin that the anti-war feeling is now widespread in Russia. 'The story involving Yabloko contains an important theme – 'peace is better than war',' he posted on social media. 'This proposition enjoys far broader support than that essentially marginal party does. 'Even among the loyal and obedient electorate of United Russia [a party which is resoundingly pro-Putin], there are millions of men and women quietly muttering under their breath: 'When will this finally end? It's high time they reached an agreement.' 'They're butting heads like rams and spilling so much blood for no good reason. 'We need peace, negotiations and diplomacy. Enough killing one another and razing to the ground what took decades to build, all for the sake of yet another Mala Tokmachka [a Ukrainian village Russia is unable to 'liberate']. 'I would cautiously venture that, if not a majority, then at least a very significant part of society thinks roughly this way.' Chaadaev is no ordinary critic of the war. In the four years since it started, he has become a key figure in producing drones to kill Ukrainians.  Yet even he now voices scepticism, and berates Putin's twisted public excuse for the war – that of 'de-Nazifying' his enemy. The reality is that Ukraine's new missile and drone-reach deep into Russia, its ability to cripple oil refineries and depots, to hit key military targets and space-rocket factories hundreds of miles from the front lines and to sink shadow fleet tankers and paralyse ports has changed the thinking of key figures in Moscow, if not Putin. This is almost certainly because the pain of the war is finally now being felt in myriad ways by millions of people across Russia. A firefighting helicopter is pictured flying above a burning Wildberries facility following a reported Ukrainian drone strike in Moscow. Putin was recently forced to announce a bailout for the company Potato prices, for example, have soared almost 40 per cent this year. Almost all Putin's Black Sea and Azov Sea grain exports – worth £11billion a year – have also been scuppered by attacks on ports and commercial vessels, with losses felt by farmers. Russian Grain Union president Arkady Zlochevsky warned: 'This is a catastrophic level. Colossal losses.' Putin was this week forced to announce a bailout for Wildberries – aka the Russian Amazon – after dozens of its logistical hubs had been hit by exploding Ukrainian drones, causing an estimated £9billion in damages. The online marketplace – accused by Kyiv of supplying the Russian war machine – is secretly part-owned by Putin's closest aides, so the pain would have been felt deep inside the Kremlin. More acutely, it was felt by suppliers who are staring bankruptcy in the face, with one saying: '97 per cent of my goods burned. How do I pay the loans, and what do I pay my supplier with?' Margarita Yevstigneyeva, head of the Association of Suppliers of Goods for E-Commerce Platforms, said more than 400,000 sellers had been affected. As for Ukraine's attacks on oil refineries, Larisa, 42, spent seven hours over two days in queues to buy petrol in Moscow. 'I drove from the west of Moscow, where I live, to the south and found no petrol station selling petrol, just diesel at some of them,' she said. 'I passed by more than 20 filling stations.'  Queues now stretch for miles outside petrol stations and fights are breaking out on forecourts as tempers fray over queue-jumping or drivers surreptitiously try to fill cans in addition to their tanks while others wait. Yet Putin and his cronies are unmoved and show a distinct lack of empathy.  A telling moment came when, asked on state TV about petrol queues across Russia, where more than 70 per cent of filling stations now have disrupted supplies, Putin's energy minister Sergei Tsivilev, 64, replied smugly: 'I drive diesel.' This was 'available at all petrol stations', he added. This week, with his brow furrowed, 73-year-old Putin himself (reading from a prepared script written in giant print size because he refuses to wear glasses) was forced to acknowledge that the Ukrainian attacks were causing significant harm.  This was hardly the plan when he announced in 2022 at the start of the invasion that he aimed to wrap up the war in days with the fall of Kyiv. Putin insisted that there was no crisis, no 'critical consequences'. But he did admit that the attacks by Ukraine's drones 'do, of course, cause us damage – that is obvious. We understand that, we see it.' Many in Russia are now talking of the country's 'August Curse' or 'Black August' – a reference to the fact that this calendar month has an uncanny habit of shaping future political developments and national ruptures. It was in August 35 years ago that the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, returned to Moscow from the Black Sea after a three-day hardline coup against him had finally been quashed – a coup attempt from which he would never recover and which toppled him four months later. August, too, when in 1998 Russia defaulted on domestic debt and devalued the rouble, savaging the savings of millions and instilling a loathing of capitalism and a yearning for the communism of old. A year later in August, President Boris Yeltsin anointed Putin as Prime Minister and his succcessor. In August 2000, the Kursk submarine sank killing all 118 on board. The litany continues with August 2008 when Putin began his first land grabs, going to war with the ex-Soviet state of Georgia.  By August 2014 he was pushing into Ukrainian territory in Donbas, massacring hundreds of retreating Ukrainian troops at the battle of Ilovaisk. So began the 12-year nightmare in eastern Ukraine that continues to this day. The question now is whether this August Curse will finally bring Putin, and his incompetent stewardship of Russia, down. 'It's doubtful,' said an academic in Moscow. 'At least not soon. There are clear signs he will soon seek to mobilise more men for the war, yet not announce it as such.' The number of men covertly leaving Russia in fear of the looming mass mobilisation has been growing. But the doors may soon be slammed shut. In Krasnoyarsk, a major city in Siberia, residents, including women, are being summoned en masse to military recruitment offices for 'data verification'. An anti-Putin partisan group, ATESH, has reported 'hidden restrictions on men of mobilisation age leaving the country', including cumbersome airport screening which has meant male travellers missing their flights. 'The authorities fear provoking a wave of panic and are trying to avoid any publicity,' said the group. The academic added: 'Putin will double down on the war and repression after the election in September. He now admits the damage that the war is causing yet he cannot halt it. 'He needs either this war or another war to maintain the repression and control that is essential to his grip on power and his wealth. 'Putin has only one direction, and he will proceed with it until the ruling circle – some of whom can see the folly of his actions – stop him.'