Ukraine Russian invasion: Five Signs War In Ukraine Is The Last Gasp Of The Putin Era - by Loren Thompson

When Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine two months ago, Western observers were aghast at what appeared to be a resurgence of Russian expansionism (often dubbed revanchism).

Eight weeks in, the landscape looks different. Moscow’s plans for a quick occupation have collapsed, to be replaced by a grinding war of attrition that is beginning to resemble a quagmire.

Those of us who thought Putin would be too smart to undertake such a campaign were obviously wrong, even though our predictions of what would go wrong have been largely validated.

So maybe the time has come for a broader reassessment of where Putin’s Russia stands today, and to consider the possibility that rather than being resurgent, it is in an advanced state of decay—the kind of decay causing its leaders to lash out in the way Lenin predicted capitalism would in its death throes.

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