Thread by @samagreene

Throughout this crisis, one key analytical divide (of several) has been between those analysts who focus on Russian domestic politics on the one hand, and military analysts on the other. I'm obviously in the former camp.

By and large, with notable exceptions, analysts of Russian domestic politics thought war was possible, but unlikely. We generally came to that conclusion based on the risks that a war entails for Putin domestically, and a general assumption about the primacy of domestic politics.

We can debate those conclusions and assumptions later, but we were obviously wrong.

Military analysts generally looked at the scale of forces arrayed against Ukraine and said this was too big to signal anything but war. It certainly looks like they were right.

At this point, we probably need to pay a bit less attention to people like me, and a bit more to the military analysts -- and especially to the journalists on the front lines, who will tell us what's going on.

War follows its own logic, which it will impose on the other logics of politics.

But that doesn't mean that domestic politics will go away, and that we will be able to ignore it forever.

Depending on how long it lasts, how "well" it goes (from a Russian military perspective), how hard the Ukrainian military hits back, and how the West retaliates, this war will impose greater or lesser costs on the Russian public and elite -- and thus on Putin.

For reasons I am unable to fathom at the moment, Putin is mortgaging Russia's future to pay for this war.

Not all Russians -- regardless of their place in the socio-economic food chain -- may be happy with that transaction.

As an academic, most of my research is on protests and revolutions, and one of the things we know is that people are most likely to rise up when they lose the ability to imagine a future better than today. This war has the power to do that.

So, while I'm done making predictions for a while, now is when the real analysis begins.