Friday 29 March 2024

What ARE Putin's next plans?

Vladimir Putin believes in revenge. Defectors, troublesome opposition leaders, journalist investigators reporting on Kremlin corruption, anyone threatening his leadership and regime gets the revenge treatment, often involving a fatal "incident". The shooting at the concert hall in which 143 people died is going to lead to much more than the arrest of the four alleged terrorists, their torture and eventual execution. Putin is still making it clear that he believes the government in Ukraine and thus its western backers, too, were behind the atrocity in one way or another and dismisses the total denials from Kyiv and from Washington. So what he plans next is probably a massive revenge attack on Ukrainian cities. Soon after the shootings, Russia launched missile and drone attacks on Kyiv and other cities but I suspect this was a gesture strike which will be followed in due course by something much heavier and more widespread. Ukraine was innocent of the concert hall attack but the Ukrainian people are going to suffer because Putin wants to demonstrate to the Russian people that he is in charge and that he knows who was behind the massacre, even though he has himself acknowledged that the four arrested are Islamic terrorists, and not from Ukraine. The Russian people will expect and will support revenge because the atrocity was a tragedy for the whole country and they will want those responsible to suffer, and if their leader says Ukraine was behind it they might just believe him. So I fear that in the next few weeks, there is going to be a huge stepping up of attacks on Ukraine. Perhaps Putin will also order a mass mobilisation of fresh troops which would have been unpopular only a few weeks ago but now might be more acceptable. That may well be what Putin is thinking. The omens are bad for Ukraine.

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