I agree, its disappointing. As a European I am ashamed of the west (=us) not supporting Ukraine as we should.
Pretty much each person I spoke to feels the same. Its just - western politicians are mostly cowards, dilettantes and certaily not the leaders we should have.
It's like in the USA, all the money in politics now --coupled with high levels of invective and even death threats during campaigns (and ongoing during governance)-- tends to drive out qualified individuals and attract either wealthy narcissists or pseudo-populist extremists.
A drive towards autocracy naturally ensues, but in a lot of cases the newer leaders are incompetent even if on paper they have the ability to move certain levers of power once in office. The outcomes are erratic and depend both on how well the ground was laid in the agencies reporting to the autocrat and what the rest of the governmental structure looks like.
In the case of Putin though, he's not new and hardly an incompetent, and there is a component of post-Soviet society that long since began to yearn for "the old order" during the chaotic years under Yeltsin and Gorbachev, even if it took a lot of very selective memory to get there. Putin is thuggish but also entirely capable of nuance where it's called for, e.g. his brutal crackdowns in Chechnya contrast with his care not to characterize terrorists as "Islamic terrorists" and his publicized attendance at ceremonies for the opening of any new mosques. The main thing though is his projection of order and strength. To be on the wrong end of it at home in Russia now is two things: uncomfortable, but familiar and so ironically also comforting, at least to those who remember the chaos after the initial joys of
glasnost.
Still, over time, Putin's methodically orchestrated changes to the structure of post-Soviet Russian government, and the economic and psychological effect on Russians of living in a kleptocracy -- in a thieving den of oligarchs tolerated by Putin (so long as they kick back dough to him and stay out of opposition politics)-- have been bound to cause discontent not only among the citizenry but within government circles.
Everyone knows Putin was KGB, and no one is sure what is the day to day reach of the successor FSB or other less formal means of intimidation of Russian citizens (aside from mass telephonic surveillance). Every time there's some widely publicized death --by poisoning, by "falling out a window"-- of one of Putin's perceived enemies at home or abroad, the mystique within Russia of Putin's omipotence grows.
And yet there's no way Putin or any autocrat can control the thoughts of the plain citizen or the weary number-crunching bureaucrat or the disgruntled soldier in Russia, say one who remembers having been sent to patrol the godforsaken border of Tajikistan with China in times when resupply was a joke along lines of "Is there any news from Moscow?" during an 8-year deployment... or is now sent to invade a western neighbor whose citizens look just like him and likely speak at least some Russian, since that language is still at least a
lingua franca if not first language in homes of eastern Europe.
So what are they thinking this week, all those governed by Putin? Not even Vladimir knows, and the Russian press is cowed enough by now that they're not going to inquire and then run color pieces as filler in their state-directed news of the war on Ukraine. The press certainly might be directed to some pro-Putin opinion. But if one is a citizen inside Russia now and some acquaintance asks what to think of the situation in Ukraine this morning, one might be inclined to strive for a noncommittal response, even though there are photos of protests already starting to spring up. Students and older activists are always the first to bring idealism to the street. It doesn't mean they are alone. It means others are more cautious.
Fear of being found out doesn't mean Putin doesn't have some fairly organized opposition inside Russia. It does mean they must bide their time, possibly until he dies. If he's ill, and ill enough to have a pretty short lease on life now, not only is he more dangerous but so also is the post-Putin situation: a non-democratic country forced to switch horses while running a major military operation is primed to let the military figure out what to do next.
The question though remains whether rumors of Putin's illness really are just rumor, or even a ruse perpetrated by the man himself, to help ferret out hidden opposition, or whether it's true that he's gravely ill and so in a position to figure his legacy will be that he heroically worked to restore all due glory to Russia. Either way a man who would fake fatal illness to discover traitors or who would launch a 21st century attack on a sovereign neighbor in Europe is an extremely dangerous enemy.
One can almost understand the west's reluctance to engage now decisively with a guy who's been clever at revealing or concealing over time whatever he wishes broadcast or hidden, but it's difficult to forgive the West's not having gamed this out far better ahead of time. It's not like they didn't know this day was coming. The western alliances have ended up playing it the way corporations play the quarter-end: "oh hell it's nearly here, ok let's just crunch out how it would fly to sell half of WXYZ and announce a merger with ABCD, let's have this done by 2pm so we can announce it after the market closes."
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