By Bond Robertson 
The war in Ukraine has not gone quite as Vladimir Putin had hoped, and reports suggest the Ukrainian offensive has caused the warring president to run out of patience.
Criticism of Sjojo
In Russia, recent Ukrainian advances have meanwhile led to criticism of Sergei Shoigu and his Defense Ministry. He is accused of trying to hide Russia’s losses in the region, according to the US Institute for the Study of War. ISW.
According to a source in ISW, Putin is said to have issued orders to settle matters within a month. This is the period that Vladimir Putin gave his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to make significant progress in the war against Ukraine.
One of the demands was that Russian forces, among other things, launch a new attack on a “major Ukrainian city.”
– If this is true, then Putin may be looking for a reason to get rid of Shogoj. Putin cannot lead operations himself, but it is difficult to simply replace the defense minister, says senior researcher Tor Bökvoll at the Norwegian Defense Research Institute (FFI).
He believes that it would be difficult for the Russians to be able to consolidate their grip or launch a major attack on a Ukrainian city in such a short time.
– The Russians are on the defensive. They gathered forces in Luhansk and there was an attempt to launch a counterattack on the city of Kobzhansk. “It’s the only chance they have in a city, but they’ve been trying for a long time to no avail,” Bockvall says.
The deadline is running out
According to ISW, time is running out on Putin’s original deadline for his defense minister.
They point to a source in the Kremlin who claims that Putin a few weeks ago gave Shoigu a deadline of one month, until the beginning of October, to achieve major successes in the war.
This request therefore came before a series of deadly and tactically important attacks against Crimea, the Black Sea Fleet, and Russian defense lines.
On Friday, the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea was attacked, with 30 to 40 officers reportedly killed in that attack alone.
It is likely that none of these setbacks in the war will in any way improve Sergei Shoigu’s position in the Kremlin.
– Mobilization must have been announced
Bokvaul believes that what Putin could have done a long time ago was to announce a new round of mobilization, but this is now a bit too late to change the course of the war in the short term.
Both Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu have previously been criticized for how the war in Ukraine was being conducted. Both former rebel commander Igor Girkin and the late Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin have criticized the leadership on repeated occasions.
Deadline: – The beginning of October
They were dissatisfied with how the war started and how it was managed, and that Shougo had ignored the fact that they had suffered great losses and problems.
According to the information, Putin demanded that the situation on the front improve and that Russia stop the Ukrainian counterattack.
“If the source’s claim is true, this could indicate that the Russian military leadership may order relentless counterattacks in the hope of forcing the Ukrainian counteroffensive to reach its climax, regardless of the high cost to Russia’s military capabilities,” the Institute for the Study of War wrote.
According to the source, Shoigu accepted Putin’s demands. Meanwhile, the President is said to have begun considering a possible successor to the role of Defense Minister, Colonel-General Mikael Teblinski.
Vladimir Putin must emerge as a strong leader and show that he is doing something about the war. He promises progress in the war, but he also can’t extract gold from the gray stone, says Bockvol.