Well yes it can be dangerous if Putin cannot be creative enough to talk his way out of this mess to a negotiation that should end up "ok like I said y'all need to quit threatening us, I think you get ti."
I mean hell he can just take a page from Nxon and Kissinger: sit down at a table, tell Zelensky and puppet administrators from the eastern provinces "enough fighting already, like I have said all along you must learn to live with each other in harmony" and then just declare peace with honor and go home. Let the dumbstruck people back home wonder wtf happened there for a little while. They'll just be happy to not have their sons and brothers being sent into battle any more.
Anyway the people already complain sotto voce about the leadership of both the military and Putin 24/7 -- if they're like we were about Presidents Johnson and then Nixon and their respective secretaries of defense and state while the Vietnam War chewed up our classmates and brothers. Even if we didn't object to the war itself or to presence of our kin "over there", we grumbled about how it was going.
The leaders do know this habit of plain citizens. Nothing they can do about it will benefit them. If they look back at history of trying to suppress grumbling about the government, they will realize that overlooking (semi-)private criticism is preferable to what eventually happens in the streets when suppression of such commentary occurs.
But see Russia blew it by already having criminalized criticism of the state. It was already not even ok to bitch about the government in a pub... It's why protest escalated instantly to streets when the draft was announced. In for a penny, in for a pound.
