Thread by @ABarbashin

What will happen in Russia domestically in case Russia - US talks fail and major escalation is on its way. @Stanovaya here for @CarnegieRussia raises a number of important points. Thread 1/9

Naturally if the frontier is on fire, all the conservative forces would accelerate their efforts to secure the country from within with triple speed.
Obviously the first target would be the internet. 2/9

I can imagine a situation of a massive coordinated attack by Rozkomnadzor+ on foreign platforms with demands to ban "war propaganda" which could be anything and everything that Russia would be denying at the moment: failure to comply will lead to slowing down and blocking 3/9

Our most loved and cherished platforms (YouTube, FB). There would be no better time for that. Probably won't happen at once - public reaction and all that - but inevitable anyway.
Secondly we can expect a coordinated campaign against all "content producers" that are critical 4/9

Journalists, human rights activists, comedians, commentators etc. - forcing them either to emigrate or face penalties for one of dozen ridiculous law violations. What would keep siloviki from getting few dozen "collaborators" in a week? 5/9

Stanovaya also mentions a very likely scenario of an assault on business and assets that haven't been divided yet - who's gonna be paying attention to few "corruption" stories here and there - while the war is at the door? 6/9

Important point: to smooth things out we might expect some generous spending for general public so that individual repression stories bother "average Russian" even less than usual, on top of major FP escalation. 7/9

Stanovaya also implies we could see a major campaign to cleanse the party politics, getting those KPRF and other to abide by every rule without even hints of stepping out of designated lines of proper behavior. 8/9

And to top this of we could expect a massive propaganda campaign in culture, education and everything related to social life.
"Blame it all on the war" as they say 9/9
carnegie.ru/commentary/862…