Downfall

Putin has one overriding aim - to stay in power. The greatest threat to that objective are his own people and, indirectly, the West. His strategy has been to use the Blood and Soil tactic favoured by dictators and would-be dictators around the world since time immemorial - Make Russia Great Again, to co-opt a famous phrase.

To achieve that tactic we now know he spent decades neutralising the West by spending a fortune on fomenting policy splits and divisions which allowed him to walk into wherever he wanted with no fear of reprisals, which had worked till now. He's behind Trump, Brexit, reliance of Russian gas, Conservative Friends of Russia, Londongrad, dodgy political donations, etc, etc, etc. Where is that Russia Report?

However, he didn't plan on Ukraine managing to unite the West by its heroic stance against his incursion. Now he's facing his own people AND the West. A huge miscalculation.

Given he relies on a very small coterie of enforcers who control the levers of power, he needs to be careful, especially now the body bags are starting to come home and conscripts realise they have been lied to about what they're doing. 

Inexplicably, I believe he's not yet used his in-theatre thermobaric weapons (although the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. has said that Russia utilised a thermobaric bomb on Monday), ergo, the nuke threat is conceivably a bluff, although he does have tactical nukes and these are what are being obliquely referred to. As I have said before, threats are only of use while they're threats and many use verbal threats in the hope they'll be enough and they'll never be forced to enact them.

His only option, given the circumstances and the high likelihood of Mutual Assured Destruction in the event of letting off nukes (which is antithetical to his primary objective), is to climb down and yet announce some kind of victory that adds to the Blood and Soil trope - such as retaining the eastern, occupied territories that are mainly Russian in ethnicity anyway, maintaining the fiction that this was his true aim from the start.

No-one, and I mean no-one, is talking about Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that's completely unconnected geographically to Russia and sits on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania. That's a bit of a thorn in Europe's and NATO's side. What about swapping Kaliningrad for Eastern Ukraine? I'm sure the citizens of Kaliningrad would be as happy to escape Putin's clutches as the Eastern Ukrainians might be to welcome him.

Claiming a limited victory is his only salvation, unless he very shortly wants a coup on his hands, which will utterly demolish his overriding priority. Are any army generals, I wonder, already in discussion with the 90 year old Gorbachev to come in as a stand-in leader till fair elections are held? The allegedly sacked Chief of the Russian Defence Staff, Valery Gerasimov, for example, unless he's already been shot. Russia denies he's been sacked, which probably means he has. 

One wonders whether Putin has fallen to the delusion so many dictators fall to - to believe he knows more about battle strategy and tactics than his army experts. If that's the case, then his cards are marked.

There again, if we're now in the last days of Putin, as many believe, the West can just keep piling weapons into Ukraine and wait for his downfall at the hands of his own people. He's known for taking high stakes gambles and has invariably won due to the groundwork done by his acolytes, but this time he never figured Volodymyr Zelenskyy into his calculations - a man who has inadvertently, singlehandedly and remarkably united Europe by the many demonstrations of his leadership and indefatigability.

The problem dictators have is that once their friends get promoted to top positions with nowhere else to advance to, they are viewed by the dictator as candidates for the dictator's own position and are therefore enemies - and those in the top positions know this. Stalin was a master at setting the top people against each other and one wonders whether Putin has the same manipulative skill.

It's interesting to note that while Boris Johnson has announced sanctions against Russia's 2nd largest bank, VTB, he has given customers 30 days to move their assets, which seems to defeat the object. The reason given is that the government doesn't want to penalise British citizens who may have money in the bank and to give them time to transfer out. However, on accusations of receiving dodgy money from Russian oligarchs with Kremlin links, the Tory Party said they had British citizenship, so they too can take advantage of the loophole. Something stinks.

There again, Boris is all over the news in his Pound Shop Churchill persona, telling foreign leaders to do more of what they're already doing in spades, while he does less than they are doing. It seems he's approaching sanctions and actions with the same level of sincerity that he uses in the Brexit negotiations.