Good stuff. With Putin you always have to be concerned with indirection. Is the Girkin candidacy an inside job? With it Putin can say, see, I’m not so bad. Work with me. Of course, this would appeal mostly to the West and not his people who would know better.

At the end of the day, it is breathtaking to see that Russian tactics have not evolved since Stalin’s day and WWII. They still throw bodies at a problem rather than risk too much expensive hardware. You can make more men easier than you can make more tanks.

In the end Putin sufffers from the same disease that all autocrats face. The job of running a country is too big for one man even with lots of direct reports. Under dictators, nations stagnate. That’s the real secret of American dominance. Lacking the freedom to innovate, society follows the autocrat down a rathole. Same as it ever was.