Kyiv, Ukraine – Clad in military fatigues, Russian President Vladimir Putin listened to his top general talk about Ukraine’s “Western sponsors”.“Lacking success on the ground, the Kyiv regime is trying to convince its Western sponsors that it overtook the initiative and had significant battlefield gains,” Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s General Staff of the Armed Forces, told Putin in televised remarks.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listIn response, Putin urged him to “continue analysing” the involvement of each Western nation in the war that has not gone according to Moscow’s battlefield plans and its wish to “demilitarise” Ukraine back in 2022.“We’ll need this analysis for the possible making of responsible decisions in the future,” the Russian president said in the video broadcast, released at the beginning of a news cycle in the United States ahead of the Independence Day weekend.To anyone familiar with the recent turn of hostilities, their conversation seemed staged and based on false information.Putin claimed that his troops “completely liberated” the long-contested eastern city of Kostiantynivka, even though Ukrainians still control parts of it, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy challenged Putin to meet him there to “find a diplomatic solution” to end the war.Putin also purported that this year, Moscow seized more than 3,000 square kilometres (1,158 square miles) of “our land” in Ukraine.But because of the shifting front lines and Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Moscow’s actual gains between January and Ju …
