Yeah - for example the Economist cover on the 19th.
Putin still enjoys tremendous domestic support. He has no effective opposition. Putin wants to claim Ukraine. Ukraine can't fight Russia alone. Will the West fight harder for Ukraine than Russia/Putin?
What happens if Ukraine's leaders are assassinated?
Stronger sanctions against Russia? Europe still depends on Russian fossil fuel, as do China and others, so leverage is limited. Strangling European energy supply remains a weapon at Putin's disposal. Economic MAD, sure, but who's going to back down first? The autocrat, or the union of democratic states?
But does he really? The economic situation is not great, the Southern Ukraine border has been a mess for almost a decade, COVID wasn't exactly a success (their vaccine didn't perform as well as expected)... There has been a lot of grumbling over the last couple of years. In fact, I think he counts on this conflict to shore up his internal support significantly.
> He has no effective opposition.
Well, when he did, he made sure to kill or jail them, so that's not really an indicator I'd rely on.
I agree that there is a good chance things might not be as bad as they look for him, though. It's easy for us to talk tough in February, with Springtime on the doorstep and enough gas to last several months; the real challenge will be September / October.
This is going to be hard, the cost will be heavy, but much, much heavier on Russia. But we’re at war, whether we like it or not, and we have to do this.
But I did just finish catching up to current on the Revolutions podcast which covers 10 political upheavals defined in the podcaster’s terms as Revolutions under a broad label and what’s amazing to me is that any of the Revolutions that tended to center around strongmen also tended to outstay their welcome and any of the Revolutionary Big Cheeses that lived to old age tended to lose touch with their own inner circle. The monarchs or whoever was being overthrown were also not immune to this: if they were popular, it was often because people didn’t actually know them very well and they tended to lose popularity quickly when they made the worse blunders of their lives.
So, just a perspective, and maybe some of this is applicable to Putin, but again, I’m not in good faith going to try to make that call but leave it to those who maybe can.
I'm not convinced that he's quite the buffoon he's being portrayed as lately.
This is a shrewd ex-KGB officer who's held onto power for more than two decades.