Thread by @samagreene

And so, #Russia de-escalates: First at home, and then in Ukraine.

(A quick thread. TL;DR: None of this is over just yet.)

/1

The most recent and very welcome piece of news is Shoigu's announcement that Russian troops will be pulling back from the Ukrainian border. It is very good to know that a full-scale invasion of #Ukraine is apparently not in the offing.

kyivpost.com/ukraine-politi…
/2

There will be a lot of mostly pointless arguing over why this happened. Some will claim that Russia never intended to invade. Others will claim that deterrence worked. Only Putin knows, and he isn't talking.

/3

What is clear, though, is that neither Kyiv nor the West made any visible concessions. If this was posturing and bullying, it doesn't appear to have achieved anything, and Zelensky and Biden have little reason to regret their courses of action, whatever Putin may have said.

/4

The slightly older news is the remarkable drop-off in arrests at yesterday's protests: "only" around 1800.

ovdinfo.org/news/2021/04/2…

/5

Yes, 1800 arrests are still a lot, given that the constitution guarantees the right to peaceful protests -- and these protests _were_ peaceful. But the number pales when compared to what we saw in January, when some 11,000 people were arrested.

/6

As with Ukraine, it was the Kremlin that deescalated here, not its opponents. Yesterday's protests do not appear to have been appreciably smaller than the January protests, and if anything they were bigger. That, too, will feel like a win for the opposition.

/7

On both fronts -- with Ukraine and with the opposition -- the Kremlin is likely to have calculated that further escalation would create unpredictability, at a time when Putin is clearly hoping for smooth sailing.

/8

But if the Kremlin believes that de-escalation is a more easily controllable process, that's only because it believes it has proven its points, and that both Ukraine and the opposition will avoid pressing their respective advantages, lest Moscow re-escalate.

We'll see.

/9

On the home front, meanwhile, complacency would be misplaced. Next week, a court will begin proceedings to decide whether Navalny's core opposition organizations are "extremist", a ruling that will have far-reaching consequences (and which is likely a foregone conclusion).

/10

The Kremlin seems to have set its sights on eliminating the pro-democratic opposition as such, or at least severely marginalizing it.

/11

Marginalization, of course, tends to create radicalization, but the relatively restrained response to yesterday's protests may have dulled people's sense of threat. Again, we'll see.

/12

Overall, though, there are fewer people in jail than there might have been, fewer people in hospital, and fewer people in immediate fear of war. And that is all good news.

/END