In today’s newsletter: Our Russian affairs reporter on Vladimir Putin’s slipping approval and singular goal – as discontent ripples from wider society to the reachers of the Kremlin Good morning. There is little doubt that when Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he did not expect his troops to still be embroiled there in 2026. And he surely never envisaged a scaled-down victory parade in Moscow, stripped of military hardware, for fear of Ukrainian drone attacks on his own ca