Russian president vladimir putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives as he visited headquarters of the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. AP Russian President Vladimir Putin was attempting to demonstrate that he's not isolated "in a bunker" by meeting with commanders in two regions of Ukraine that Moscow claims to have annexed. That's the conclusion of Angela Stent, a senior adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor emerita of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. The Kremlin's announcement that Putin had visited Kherson and Luhansk followed a leak of Stent, who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells NPR's Michel Martin on Morning Edition that Russian progress in a "grinding war of attrition" in Ukraine has been hindered by corruption in the military, poor training, and poorly maintained equipment. Images of the Russian president's travel also offered a counterpoint to Interview highlights On Ukraine's assessment that recent Russian assaults failed This is a grinding war of attrition and the Russians have already lost a fifth of the territory that they've taken since they began the war in February of last year. And that's because of corruption in the Russian military. We know about that. The equipment is rusted and they haven't trained their recruits properly. So they have not made the kind of progress that they thought they would. And the Ukrainians have been fighting very valiantly back. On the message Putin intended...