Style over substance.
Putin was part of formulating that losing strategy.
It plays well to a certain captive audience, but that audience has to be cowed and also willing to profess support in numbers large enough to cause a sense of general fear and reinforce it in their own local communities.
Russians can allign themselves with the criminal violent civilian element, or the criminal violent government element.
Often they are the same people.
But the only choice is which violent criminal group holds more sway on any given day.
It is a simple matter of survival for a people who have lived that way for many generations.
The rest of the former USSR/Warsaw Pact nations have broken away from that model.
Is it starting to make sense to you?
We have some here who apparently feel the Ukrainians are more Russian than the Russians, and can never change. My take is that a modest majority of people there want to break with that model, and with help from the West (tough love from the EU?) and Russia sidelined, Ukraine could change, though it’ll be a tough struggle. What do you think?