Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Cracks in the Kremlin’s war machinery rarely surface, and almost never from inside the parliament that has rubber-stamped it.
The Kremlin’s tightly disciplined political class has spent more than three and a half years insulating Vladimir Putin from open dissent over the invasion of Ukraine.
Every major setback on the battlefield has been absorbed by the Defense Ministry rather than surfaced through the State Duma, where deputies compete to sound more hawkish than each other.
Now a Ukrainian partisan intelligence network says that unanimity is beginning to bend.
ATESH, a Ukrainian-Crimean partisan movement that runs agent networks inside Russia, is reported to have said that a group of newly elected Duma deputies is preparing a closed appeal to Defense Minister Andrei Belousov asking him to pull Russian units out of the Lyman sector in northern Donetsk.
According to ATESH, several of the deputies have lost relatives in the war.
Maintaining control over the units
The document, the partisans say, will demand that troops “be withdrawn from problematic sections of the front to save soldiers’ lives and maintain control over the units.”
It also targets Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, citing what ATESH describes as “the lack of professionalism” of Russia’s top uniformed officer and “systematic lies cultivated by Russian generals” about the state of the front.
None of the deputies have been named, and the appeal has not been made public. ATESH’s account has not been independently verified.
What is driving the appeal
The deputies’ anger, according to the partisan report, is fueled by the situation around Lyman, where Ukraine’s Third Army Corps has been running a counteroffensive it calls Operation Vivaldi.
Ukrainian commander Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi said on September 20 that Ukrainian forces have regained control over 125 square kilometers across two phases of the operation, including 50 square kilometers taken back from Russian occupation.
The second phase liberated the villages of Shandryholove and Derylove and brought Drobysheve fully under Ukrainian control, according to the Third Army Corps. Ukrainian estimates put Russian losses across both phases at more than 3,000 killed and wounded, figures that have not been independently confirmed.
Biletskyi says three major Russian formations, the 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies and the 1st Guards Tank Army, have been degraded in the sector. Russia’s elite Rubicon drone unit was pulled back from the front line after heavy losses, the Kyiv Independent reported on September 20.
A rare political signal, if it holds up
If the ATESH account is accurate, the appeal would mark a departure from the pattern of sitting Duma members deferring to the Defense Ministry on operational questions, and would place pressure on the Kremlin from inside its own political base rather than from opposition politicians or exiled critics.
Neither the Russian Defense Ministry nor any of the unnamed deputies have publicly addressed the ATESH claim.
