Thread by @zoyashef

Continued from

https://twitter.com/zoyashef/status/1497378932936839172

So, Putin expected a cake walk but there's no cake to be seen. What's he to do? Try to kill Zelenskiy? He'll die a martyr. How do you control a country of 44 million Ukrainians who suddenly have something to believe in? 25/?

This isn't a quick, clean, hit. There are mass civilian casualties, missiles raining down on a country on the European continent. A country that's next door to NATO and EU members - Baltics which have been warning about this for years, and now they know ... 26/?

They know what Putin will do. There's no more doubts about whether he would be willing to risk a full-scale war. It _is_ a full-scale, hot war, in Europe! Now Putin has the West's attention, but it's not the sort of attention he wanted. 27/?

Now there are real sanctions. Sure, they're not as hard or as quick as they ought to have been. But they are hitting Putin personally - naming Putin personally. Naming his entourage. They are going to hurt. 28/?

The West can't afford to ignore this. Putin has played their hand - they can't allow a hot war on the continent of Europe without doing things like cutting off Nord Stream 2, cutting Russia from SWIFT. Now, sure, Putin's Russia can probably withstand a lot of this. 29/?

The thing about Slavs is, as I said, we know how to suffer. We are used to it. Famine, war, death - these are not hypothetical things to us. I was born in Ukraine in 1985 and in my lifetime I remember empty shelves, I remember the gas only running an hour or two a day. 30/?

I remember being hungry and cold. But do Russians want to suffer for Putin? Because Ukrainians - well, they're suffering for Zelenskiy. They're suffering for themselves. They're fighting for freedom. They're fighting for an ideology. 31/?

How long will Russians buy into this war, a war they know Putin started, despite what their TVs might be telling them? How long will they watch videos of Ukrainian soldiers telling their Russian warships to go fuck themselves? 32/?
politico.eu/article/go-fuc…

I think back to the fall of the USSR. I wrote a few years ago that the Chernobyl disaster seemed to me like the beginning of the end of it all. The thing that did it was that people stopped trusting the bullshit state TV told them 33/?
politico.eu/article/annive…

After Chernobyl, Soviets began to see behind the ideology, they started seeing through the lies. Russians, I think, I hope, will start now to see through Putin's lies. 34/?

Now, Putin - Putin is a man who wants nothing less than absolute power. How long does he think he can last like this? How long will he hold out? How will he control a country of 40 million or so born-again patriots? 35/?

How long can he control his own country, which has nothing to believe in except ... well ... Putin. 36/?

And so here we are. Putin may not have people left in his entourage to tell him no, he may not have a free media that will ask these sorts of tough questions of him. But he has got to be thinking about this. 37/?

And that makes tonight a very dangerous night indeed. Putin needs this to finish, fast. How will he do that? Zelenskiy, at midnight, warned that tonight would be key. He warned the fighting would intensify. 38/?

And so I will be sitting here, from my safe home in Australia, watching this horror unfold, afraid for the people of Ukraine, afraid of what a surprised Putin might do. 39/39

And, finally, in story form

politico.eu/article/ukrain…