Thread by @samagreene

What we’re seeing now in Eastern Ukraine — suspicious explosions, organized evacuation of residents to Russia — does not have to mean war.

But war now feels a lot closer at hand than it did yesterday.

I’m not going to get into the business of parsing out the likelihood of possible scenarios. Not my skill set.

And I stand by my longstanding analysis that the institutions and incentives of Putin’s power augur against war. But as with any analysis, there’s a margin of error.

Errors of analysis happen. When they do, it’s important to be honest about them, and to figure out where the analysis went wrong.

In this case — and with the caveat that the analysis isn’t wrong *yet* — I have to wonder about whether I’ve underestimated the degree of change in the Russian regime.

A technical point: when I say regime, I refer to the rules and institutions that govern the exercise of power. This is separate from the government and the state.

The Kremlin’s approach to the opposition, to independent media and civil society, and to the management of elex has been gradually tightening ever since Putin came to power in 2000. Repression is not new.

But a lot of analysts — myself included — have begun to feel that the last 2 years have brought a qualitative change. Indeed, last years’s Duma elex were the most repressive Russia has seen post-91.

(For more:
tldrussia.substack.com/p/choose-and-l…)

There is thus an argument to be made that the Russian regime (in the sense defined above) has shifted from a hybrid-authoritarian one, with a degree of contestation, to a regime in which coercion is much more central to the exercise of power.

If that’s true, then assumptions about the likelihood of war may not hold, if they were based on an earlier configuration of the regime.

For the most part, I think they do still hold, because despite the rise of coercion Putin still doesn’t have the apparatus necessary to govern in the widespread absence of public support.

But I’m forced to wonder whether a reconfiguration of violence domestically opens the door for a reconfiguration of violence internationally. I don’t yet have a good theoretical reason to believe that it does, but I don’t have a good reason to rule it out, either.

/END (for now)