Thread by @samagreene

This is what scares me at the moment. The war was already killing civilians, but the pace seems to be picking up.

https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1497770224472444930

I’m not here to supplant the analysis of military experts: if you want to understand the ins and outs of the war, and of how Russia fights wars, follow @KofmanMichael @RALee85 @LawDavF and others. But let me take a moment for a bit of politics.

When Putin announced the war, he talked about the invasion in the same breath as Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria. As @KofmanMichael mentions in the thread above, those wars were brutal. That’s one of the things that was so frightening about the possibility of war in Ukraine.

For the first 48 hours or so, this war was not Chechnya or Syria. While @amnesty and others have chronicled criminal attacks on civilians, there had not been the kind of wanton destruction the Russian military has inflicted elsewhere.

I’m not suggesting that’s because the top brass have grown an appreciation for human life. It’s more likely to be because Putin doesn’t want pictures of Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble to find their way back to a public that is still skeptical of this war.

In fact, much of the Russian public still seems mostly unaware of the details of the war, and state media and growing online censorship are doing their best to keep it that way. The more brutal the war gets, though, the harder it will be to cover it up.

If @KofmanMichael is right — and I believe he is — then the impact of this change in tactics will be felt in Russia, too. As the Moscow political analyst Kirill Rogov wrote earlier today, the only way to ramp up brutality in Ukraine is simultaneously to ramp up brutality at home.