Timothy Snyder writes:

Some observers of the Russo-Ukrainian war seem to think that its greatest danger is that Ukraine will win, or win too quickly, and that this will be uncomfortable for Putin, and that we should care.

This is a deeply perverse way of seeing things. Putin has chosen to fight a war of aggression and destruction in Ukraine. Wherever Russia controls Ukrainian territory, Russians commit genocidal crimes against citizens of Ukraine, including mass rape, mass killing, and mass deportation. A democracy is defending itself against an autocracy, and the fate of democracies hangs in the balance. The Russian hydrocarbon oligarchy is giving us a foretaste of cataclysm that awaits if we do not free ourselves from oil and gas. Russia blockades the Black Sea and halts food exports, threatening to spread death by starvation to tens of millions of people this year. Those are the kinds of things we should be worrying about, not Putin’s self-image.

Yet there is an even more basic problem with this reasoning, which arises from a false understanding of how power in Russia works.

The Russian media and political system is designed to keep Putin in power regardless of what happens in the outside world. Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin himself designed and which Putin himself runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for twenty years without our help. [Continue reading…]