Zelensky's drone blitzkrieg on the 'Russian Amazon' is turning public against Putin's war

 Cautiously eyeing her fellow passengers, Anastasia clutched her handbag tighter than usual as she rode on a crowded bus home from her bank's branch in northern Moscow.

This 70-year-old pensioner is now regularly withdrawing money because she hears whispers that Vladimir Putin may grab the savings of ordinary people and plough them into his endless war, or use them to prop up his creaking economy.

'I scoffed at my babushka [grandmother] stashing her roubles under her mattress,' said the modestly well-off retired senior civil servant. 

'Now I'm doing the same. I am so concerned and, honestly, scared.'

This time she withdrew just under £1,000-worth of the Russian currency, as she gradually draws down on her savings account.

'I no longer believe in this war and I'm ashamed of my country.'

She is far from alone. Her friends and many others across Russia's 11 time zones are following suit in pulling out their money.

This week a report revealed the amount of cash sloshing around inside Russia has risen by £21.3billion this year.

The wealthy, meanwhile are spiriting their money abroad if they can, with brokerage accounts in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia among the favourite outlets, as Western banks are largely closed to them.

These mass withdrawals are causing liquidity problems for Putin's economy and financial sector, already suffering as a result of bad debts following a Kremlin-driven lending boom to ramp up military output.

This gathering economic turmoil in Russia, combined with Putin's failing war in Ukraine and a loss of faith in his core and much- repeated pledge to deliver financial and political stability, mean the Russian President is now facing the perfect storm.

His predicament was crystallised this week after a senior macroeconomist, Andrei Klepach, 67, bluntly warned the President in a leaked speech to a private business club that he 'will not win' his 'war of attrition' with Ukraine.

Klepach dismantled the despot's rationale that if he keeps pressure on Ukraine, it will cave in, handing him victory.

'We have this illusion that everything there will collapse. It has not collapsed and will not collapse,' said Klepach, chief economist at VEB.RF, formerly known as Vnesheconombank, which finances major Putin projects and plays a central role in supporting Russia's war-ravaged economy.

He pointed to the level of Western financial support that will prevent this. Technologically and economically, he warned, Russia is 'losing it not only to China and the US. In some respects, we are losing it to Ukraine.'

He went further and said Putin was leading Russia into an inevitable explosive social crisis, implicitly likening the conditions to those facing President Mikhail Gorbachev – who resigned in 1991 after his political and economic reforms triggered dramatic economic decline – and, earlier, Tsar Nicholas II. 

'No one expected the February Revolution [in 1917],' he said, pointing out that just weeks before it began, Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin had doubted he would live to witness any revolution.

'The situation in the Soviet Union in 1991 – we had been heading towards it slowly and consistently, and everyone understood that we were heading towards a crisis, but there was no fatal inevitability that the Soviet Union would collapse,' he said.

Hours after the leak appeared, Klepach, for decades a highly respected insider, was fired for his sacrilegious analysis. He can only hope he will not now be thrown into a cockroach-infested cell.

Yet a year ago no one would dare voice such opinions, suggesting Putin no longer transmits anything like the fear and power that he once did. 

Exiled economic analyst Vyacheslav Shiryaev said of the Klepach analysis: 'Putin should already be jumping up from his throne, listening carefully and being horrified.'

One dramatic sign of the Russian leader's new vulnerability was an extraordinary U-turn this week concerning a tiny anti-war liberal party called Yabloko (meaning 'Apple' in Russian).

The grouping had been allowed initially to stand in September's so-called national election – in truth a mockery of a free poll because, as usual, it will be rigged to give Putin his chosen percentage of the votes, which is likely to be around 70 per cent.

Yet Putin's apparatchiks suddenly realised that Yabloko was gaining momentum with its anti-war stance, quadrupling its support in three weeks, and posing a danger as a focal point for dissent over the war.

So the Supreme Court was wheeled out to ban the party from the ballot paper on spurious grounds of flouting copyright laws and receiving foreign funding. Kremlin insiders made clear this election rigging was on Putin's personal orders.

Alexei Chaadaev, 47, a political strategist and author who is a long-time evangelist for the dictator, recently warned the Kremlin that the anti-war feeling is now widespread in Russia.

'The story involving Yabloko contains an important theme – 'peace is better than war',' he posted on social media.

'This proposition enjoys far broader support than that essentially marginal party does.

'Even among the loyal and obedient electorate of United Russia [a party which is resoundingly pro-Putin], there are millions of men and women quietly muttering under their breath: 'When will this finally end? It's high time they reached an agreement.'

'They're butting heads like rams and spilling so much blood for no good reason.

'We need peace, negotiations and diplomacy. Enough killing one another and razing to the ground what took decades to build, all for the sake of yet another Mala Tokmachka [a Ukrainian village Russia is unable to 'liberate'].

'I would cautiously venture that, if not a majority, then at least a very significant part of society thinks roughly this way.'

Chaadaev is no ordinary critic of the war. In the four years since it started, he has become a key figure in producing drones to kill Ukrainians. 

Yet even he now voices scepticism, and berates Putin's twisted public excuse for the war – that of 'de-Nazifying' his enemy.

The reality is that Ukraine's new missile and drone-reach deep into Russia, its ability to cripple oil refineries and depots, to hit key military targets and space-rocket factories hundreds of miles from the front lines and to sink shadow fleet tankers and paralyse ports has changed the thinking of key figures in Moscow, if not Putin.

This is almost certainly because the pain of the war is finally now being felt in myriad ways by millions of people across Russia.

Potato prices, for example, have soared almost 40 per cent this year. Almost all Putin's Black Sea and Azov Sea grain exports – worth £11billion a year – have also been scuppered by attacks on ports and commercial vessels, with losses felt by farmers.

Russian Grain Union president Arkady Zlochevsky warned: 'This is a catastrophic level. Colossal losses.'

Putin was this week forced to announce a bailout for Wildberries – aka the Russian Amazon – after dozens of its logistical hubs had been hit by exploding Ukrainian drones, causing an estimated £9billion in damages.

The online marketplace – accused by Kyiv of supplying the Russian war machine – is secretly part-owned by Putin's closest aides, so the pain would have been felt deep inside the Kremlin.

More acutely, it was felt by suppliers who are staring bankruptcy in the face, with one saying: '97 per cent of my goods burned. How do I pay the loans, and what do I pay my supplier with?'

Margarita Yevstigneyeva, head of the Association of Suppliers of Goods for E-Commerce Platforms, said more than 400,000 sellers had been affected.

As for Ukraine's attacks on oil refineries, Larisa, 42, spent seven hours over two days in queues to buy petrol in Moscow.