As Putin is THE major player and decision-maker in the current deplorable situation it might be useful to discuss him and his problems/possible plans rather than whether a corrupt and immoral West is better or worse than Putin's Russia. Putin is lauded by some Christians for his 'stand' against homosexuality and his government's recent policy of discouraging of abortion. Hitler took the same positions and did so for the same reason - population. Hitler wanted more Germans and Putin desperately needs more Russians and this has been suggested as one major reason for invading the Ukraine - to increase his population rapidly and comparatively easily (as he thought). Deaths in Russia exceed births to an extent that 'haunts' Putin (to quote his own spokesman). According to the official stats. for 2018, the country suffered a net loss of one person every thirty seconds throughout that year. In addition, salaries in Russia are so comparatively low that well-educated young Russians can easily triple their salaries simply by leaving the country and so a large and growing number of them do so. So the country loses many of its best assets in addition to other losses. The stats. hide the fact that anyone with a Russian passport is included in the total population figure so those who leave and never return enhance the poor figure to some degree but add nothing to the economy. Rampant alcoholism among Russian males is the major cause of death and has resulted in an average life expectancy for men is barely 60 years, the lowest in the developed world. the last few years of the victims may also be entirely economically unproductive because of associated ill-health. Putin needs a growing economy to sustain a prominent position in geo-politics but in fact it is shrinking and doing so at an increasing rate. You can't throw your weight about if you are a seven stone weakling (as they are now discovering). Russia's GDP is about that of Italy but Russia spends a comparatively massive proportion of its income on its armed forces and is also endemically corrupt. It has chosen guns and enrichment of the elite over health services or social security as demonstrated by the many 'babushkas' (little old ladies) who pretend to offer their pots and pans for sale in the street so that they can pretend that they are not begging. This is a desperate man doing desperate things before his nation becomes a third world nation.
I was listening to a discussion about whether or not Putin is guilty of War Crimes and it seems clear under international laws relating to the conduct of war that depriving civilians in war zones of food, medicine, water and power falls clearly within the definition as does the blocking of their exit routes to safety. All these have occurred. So, if the decision is made to pursue a case against him, he will be an international leper indefinitely and so his government will be unable to function. His defence that this is not a war but a 'special military operation' might satisfy him and some of his people but it 'won't wash' with most governments. He knows this, he knows that has already overstepped the line by a long way and so anything else that he does, such as using chemical weapons or even small nuclear devices, cannot make his situation any worse internationally which is a cause for great worry. Several former KGB agents now in the West opine that there will now be a groundswell of quietly expressed but growing internal dissent about the war because the country risks being excluded indefinitely from international trade and faces a massive and disastrous economic downturn such as has not been seen since the 1920's in Germany with hyperinflation, hunger, national despair and riots. The estimate, internally, is that if they are excluded from international trade, the economy will totally implode in by June of this year. Putin is desperate for a 'legacy'. It is said that he seeks out historians at social events to ask, 'What will the history books say about me?' His legacy was to be an expanded Russia but that aspiration is now a fairly hopeless since it depended on a quick takeover of the Ukraine and a West which was prepared to maybe protest for a while but to ultimately 'turn a blind eye'. This hasn't happened. Those who have known him say that a voluntary retirement or the calling of a fair election are not going to happen and that the only people with any hope of dislodging him are the FSB (secret service) and that everyone, the oligarchs, the government and Putin himself are aware of this and that the FSB will be forced to do so eventually for their own survival.
Now that Putin is apparently moderating his ambitions to 'liberate' the whole of the Ukraine, he will, at some point, face the Russian public's realisation that the 'special military operation' failed in its main purpose and that several thousand of their soldiers have died and many more been seriously wounded to little or no purpose. Returning soldiers who actually witnessed and suffered from the inefficiencies and disorganisation of the military command will have their own tales to tell if they manage to return home (no medical treatment for frostbite, forbidden to run engines for warmth because of lack of fuel, erratic provision of food and ammunition, being misled as to the likely duration and nature of the conflict once it started etc. etc.) The question is; How does Putin retain his position in these circumstances? Like all dictators, he wanted ALL of the praise for any successes in his presidency, now he faces ALL of the blame for the Ukraine debacle but is very unlikely to accept it or admit his own failures even to himself. His closest advisors must be terrified and will be attempting to deflect the blame with many fingers pointed in every possible direction. So what does a self-respecting despot do in these circumstances? Putin is ex-KGB so may well look to Stalin for a way out. When massive reverses occurred early in WWII, the paranoid Stalin blamed his generals (naturally) even though he was himself making all the strategic decisions. Arrests were made (Putin has started house arrests of some officers and officials already), people disappeared from public view (ditto). Then the arrested/disappeared were tortured into admitting that they were spies or had been conspiring to bring the dictator down by sabotaging his wise plans and a show trial followed. The accused's cooperation was obtained by threats to murder some family members and to imprison and impoverish others . I don't expect such trials to occur because Putin will need a very quick fix and it would take considerable time that he probably won't have in order to organise them. A quicker way of dealing with the 'scapegoats' was to get them to write letters confessing their own enormous failures and bad faith and exonerating the boss completely before they 'committed suicide' with the threat that failure to sign would involve harm to their family and seizure of all family assets (easy enough for Putin because his underlings' assets will mostly have been illegally obtained). If it were Putin's intention to threaten other smaller states following a successful 'intervention' in the Ukraine, he has totally shot himself in the foot now that the much vaunted Russian army is shown to be less than invincible even when fighting a much weaker opponent. Some of the field dressings obtained from Russian soldiers by Ukrainian forces bear a year of manufacture and this is usually 1978 (44 years ago!) and were useless (clearly someone/group was prepared to let their wounded suffer in order to fill their pockets), many vehicle tyres were Chinese imports of low quality which resulted in flats and immobility (the colonel responsible may have billed for best quality and bought a yacht with the difference). Cynically corrupt countries invariably have cynically corrupt armed forces (Why should the civilians get all the goodies while we live on army pay?). Talking of army pay, the conscripts get $25 a month but the recently recruited foreign mercenaries are being paid $1000 a month. If the conscripts, their families and the Russian public are not yet aware of this disparity, I hope that they quickly discover this situation which will add fuel to Putin's fire of woes.
