Browder: Putin started a war because he stole so much money that he became afraid of his own people.
The easiest way to stop people turning against you is to create a foreign enemy. That is Machiavelli 101. 1/
Browder: If Putin used a nuclear weapon, he still would not win the war.
Ukraine is too large and too dispersed. China and the Global South would step away, and Putin would become a fully defined war criminal. 2/
Browder: This war is more likely to end like Korea than with a peace agreement.
Ukraine will keep making the war more painful for Russia until both sides stop attacking each other across a fortified front line. Nobody will negotiate peace. 3X
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The Kremlin manufactured that enemy. It called Ukrainians Nazis and fascists and accused them of things they never did. Crimea then sent Putin's approval ratings through the roof. 1/
Browder: Putin has been stealing since his days in the St. Petersburg mayor's office.
Putin and about a thousand people around him stole one trillion dollars from the Russian state before the war. 2X
McFaul: Trump used to tell Zelenskyy: You don't have the cards. Zelenskyy answered: This is not a game, this is a war.
Now Trump sees that Zelenskyy has cards. The balance of power is changing, and that is why he may be more willing to help Ukraine. 1/
McFaul: The West's biggest mistake was worrying too much about what Putin thought.
That started long before the full-scale invasion. It was a mistake at the Bucharest NATO summit, during the war against Georgia and in the response that followed. 2/
McFaul: We failed to help democratic institutions take root in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. I supported that effort. We failed. I personally feel responsibility for that failure. 3/
Saakashvili, ex-president of Georgia: The Ankara agreement gives Ukraine a Patriot license, but bureaucracy and production setup will take months.
Ukrainian Patriots will not appear before next year, Ukrainska Pravda. 1/
Saakashvili: Putin trapped himself. If he agrees to a ceasefire, Russia becomes a North Korea and a satellite of China.
While Putin remains in power, there will be no ceasefire; the war will sharply escalate. 2/
Saakashvili: Without protection from ballistic missiles, Kyiv must be ready to become London during World War II: mass destruction of infrastructure, buildings and even the government quarter.
The billionaires who got rich under Putin are starting to get nervous.
Andrey Melnichenko, Russia’s biggest industrialist, says the war is breaking Russia's economy — and if nothing changes, the country ends up broke, isolated, or run by China, The Economist. 1/
Melnichenko is not anti-Putin opposition. He is an insider whose factories supported the war economy. Like most oligarchs, he lived by Putin’s rules: make money, but keep out of politics.
He speaks now because tycoons can no longer ignore the rot. 2/
The Ukraine war has come home to Russia.
Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure brought fuel queues and fistfights at filling stations. Drone strikes isolate Crimea. Forced military enlistment feeds resentment. Influencers’ war complaints go viral. 3/