Jaw-Dropping Scale of Putin’s Humiliating Crisis Revealed

Vyacheslav Prokofyev / via REUTERS Vladimir Putin’s subjects have had a dreadful summer , and it’s all thanks to him.

Ukraine flipped the focus back onto the invader after four and a half years of war on its territory.

The Ukrainians are terrorizing Russia with drones and helping to paralyze its economy through sabotage and targeted bombings.

Millions of Russians are facing both the threat of death and long lines for gas.

Putin is now on the back foot at home, where he is becoming increasingly insular and paranoid, as well as abroad, where the death toll has soared past half a million.

Ukraine’s onslaught of drone attacks has become a tsunami.

Analysis conducted by the Associated Press using Russian figures shows that the military was forced to intercept 43,000 drones over annexed Crimea in the last three months alone.

In all of last year, that number was just 7,700.

“We were living a normal life, and then suddenly it’s like this,” retiree Margarita told AP in Moscow.

Ukraine’s drones have targeted an array of critical infrastructure nodes; attacks on Russia’s oil refineries have been particularly damaging.

Oil and gas are the spine of the Russian economy, and refineries turn its vast fossil fuel reserves into exports sold worldwide.

Ukraine sees Russia’s oil industry at the heart of the war: gas is either sold abroad to finance the war, or it ends up directly in the Kremlin’s tanks.

Kyiv has struck fuel targets across the country, sending up huge columns of acrid smoke that tower over the landscape and the cities below.

In August, it struck the Bashneft-Novoil and Slavneft-Yanos refineries, both hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border.