Window on Eurasia: Putin Never Backs Down Even When He Would Benefit, Moscow Commentator Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, July 20 – In his almost 15 years in power, Vladimir Putin has “never admitted a single error” and “never made a single step backward” even when it would have been tactically or strategically to his benefit to do so, Arkady Babchenko says, and consequently, it is unlikely that he will do so in the current situation.

 

            Instead, the Moscow commentator writes on the Grani.ru portal today, the Kremlin leader has chosen “the most awful” regardless of “the number of corpses” it may have involved.  Given that history, Babchenko says, it is hard to imagine that he will change course this time again (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=53CBEBCAA3B4E).

 

            Thus, Babchenko says, Putin will move forward with what he has been doing. “By hook or by crook. If not in one place, then in another. If not now, then later. [The Kremlin leader] just doesn’t know how to behave otherwise. Consequently, the dispatch of weapons and personnel will continue.”

 

            “In any case,” the commentator says, Putin “has not once ever done anything else.”