Annual Direct Line with Vladimir Putin in Moscow - Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual "Direct Line with Vladimir Putin" live call-in show. - -/Kremlin/dpa
On Tuesday, Dmitri Alperovich, a renowned cybersecurity expert and the co-founder of CrowdStrike, laid out how Vladimir Putin is changing his military strategy in the face of surprising setbacks in their efforts to seize control of Ukraine — but how their newer, more brutal strategy could also put the Kremlin regime on a path to disaster.
In particular, noted Alperovich, the war is imposing serious domestic costs amid the total crash of the Russian economy triggered by sanctions — and the risk now becomes that if Putin cannot somehow force Ukraine to capitulate to his demands quickly, his own hold on power could be in jeopardy.
Read the whole thread below.
If at the start Putin was trying to go for a quick decapitation of Ukrainian leadership and installation of a pro-Russian leader (eg Medvedchuk), that seems completely unrealistic now (if it ever were) since he has pretty much turned the entire Ukrainian population against Russia— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170293
A number of Russian oligarchs, actors, TV personalities, etc are coming out against this war on a scale we really haven't seen since at least the First Chechen War in the 1990s— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170293
Thus, Putin is going to need a resolution to the war in the next few weeks or it will create serious problems for him domestically— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170337
Putin's only hope now is likely to rapidly unleash utter brutality on the Ukrainian people (which he has already started on by shooting MLRS rockets into Kharkiv and other cities) in order to get major concessions from Zelensky in the negotiations— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170337
His problem is that it's highly unlikely that Zelensky and the rest of the Ukrainian leadership would accept these conditions so the war and the insurgency that will follow it can drag out for a long time— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170338
Of course, tragically, it will also mean tens of thousands of dead civilians and unimaginable destruction in Ukraine\n\nEND— Dmitri Alperovitch (@Dmitri Alperovitch) 1646170338
