LA Times:

Moscow’s barrage of missile strikes on cities all across Ukraine has elicited celebratory comments from Russian officials and pro-Kremlin pundits, who in recent weeks have actively criticized the Russian military for a series of embarrassing setbacks on the battlefield.

Russian nationalist commentators and war correspondents in the state media lauded Monday’s large-scale attack as an appropriate, and long-awaited, response to Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in the northeast and the south and a weekend assault on a key bridge between Russia and Crimea, the prized Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014.

Many argued, however, that Russia should keep up the intensity of Monday’s strikes in order to win the war now, with some analysts suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin was becoming a hostage of his allies’ views on how the campaign in Ukraine should unfold.

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