stab in the back

“Most of the city and most of the neighborhood take it as a stab in the back,” said Ludovic Racinet, co-owner of The Function, a comedy club located down the street from X. “The city has done so much for Twitter, now X.”

He said he had spoken to Shoigu about insufficient equipment that had led to excessive Russian deaths, and that his dismissal was a ”“treacherous” stab in the back to Russian forces in Ukraine.

An plane crash last August which killed Yevgeny Prigozhin and top lieutenants of his Wagner private military company came two months to the day after he launched an armed rebellion that Putin labeled “a stab in the back” and “treason.”

Another association member described it as a "stab in the back".

Ukraine's ambassador to Poland has called the hauliers' protest a "stab in the back" from a country that has been a close ally ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.