Will There Be an End to Putin’s Prevarication?
John Helmer suggests that Putin’s inability to deal with war is because his energy is consumed “balancing, temporizing, equivocating,” and taking one side and then the other between the military and Russian nationalists who want Russia defended and the oligarchs who want business deals at any cost to Russian sovereignty. The price of Putin’s prevarication has been, as Gilbert Doctorow and I have emphasized, an ever-widening war that is headed out of control with the battleground moving from Donbas to deep within Russia with consequences for Europe.