Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 13 – Vladimir Putin very much wants something he can call a victory in Ukraine, Abbas Gallyamov says; but at the same time, the Kremlin leader is “subconsciously afraid” of what will happen after the end of the war there because Russians will ask questions about the conflict for which he has no answers.
The former Putin speechwriter who now is a prominent Putin critic says that the Kremlin leader’s fears about this occasionally surface because after the, both the population and the elites will want to know why was the conflict needed and he won’t have a good answer for them (echofm.online/opinions/putin-podsoznatelno-boitsya-pustoty-kotoraya-pridyot-posle-zaversheniya-vojny).
It is widely recognized that if Putin suffered defeat in Ukraine, he and his regime would be in trouble; but Gallyamov’s obseration suggests that he will also be in trouble if the war ends with something that he can plausibly claim is a victory, albeit one that is highly unlikely to be absolute.
Consequently, although the commentator doesn’t say so in this post, Putin is likely to move far more slowly to end the war than many currently expect and be far more willing to launch new wars to prevent Russians from asking difficult questions about Russian losses in Ukraine even if he claims victory.
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