interesting, i'm gonna join this.
I will list some things i know, and some things i think.
1 - forget about internal coups. not only because Putin is smart and was the commander of KGB... old soviet school. But in the course of years he has eliminated the opposition and his remaining adversaries are rightfully wary. And russian historically don't make coups. Yeah, the october revolution... a peculiar historical period, doubled with famine. In the following decades, no one has ever tried something against the current leader.
1 bis - the only real opposition Putin can find is represented by the russian billionaires. if they go to him saying "stop this, you are damaging us", then he could listen. Putin is a devious, smart dictator... He knows that powers and money go along, he doesn't want to alienate real russian money.
2 - i do believe he has a dream. He was raised in the Soviet Union, he wants to be remembered as the one that restored the old "Empire". Crazy as you want, but i believe that's one of the cores of the issue. And one of the reasons so many of the russian people still support him so vehemently.
3 - He's not bat-crazy. the russian army, right now, is not pushing in Ukraine. Yeah, maybe Ukrainian are making more resistance than expected, many soldier may be demotivated, but they are definitely not pushing, there is more military activity from the "allies" of Putin, namely the pro-russian republics nearby Ukraine.
if they are not pushing, is because Puting is holding them back... for now. Why? because before going all in, he would consider some acceptable "minor win":
3a - he certainly wants some territorial gain. the most precious territories, of course. Crimean peninsula and so on.
3b - he probably wants a declaration of surrender. Something that he can spend as home propaganda.
3c - he probably wants some insurance about NATO out of the picture. this leads us to the next point...
4 - i've read a very interesting interview from a general, and not a mr nobody, but a past commander in chief of the NATO military operations in Europe. So, not a fool and certainly not a socialist. He says that we (as western people) may not be aware of this, but it's been at least 20 years that we, as NATO, are politically messing with the border states of Russia. We disattended many of the agreements we did with Gorbachev. We (as NATO) are the ones that created the premise for all of this mess. So (he concluded), the situation is not as simply as we are told right now, and Russia is not lying when it's worried about the "NATO influence" on its borders.
5 - if Europe wanted to "strangle" Russia with economic, we should have started10 yrs ago, decreasing our dependency from Russian natural power sources.
In the end, IDK where we are heading for.
But it seems clear that we, as NATO / Europe, are not willing to force Putin's hand, now that s* & fan, you know.
We don't like it, but we want to minimize the losses and certainly we are not going to send troops in Ukraine. At most, if things go really bad, ONU will go in as military observer.
THis only means that Putin will obtain what he wants. The question is "how much of it" and "at what price for Ukraine?"
