Chris

We can, and we must.

Putin has screwed himself and he knows it. There is now a risk to him personally; it may be small right now but the longer this goes on, the worse it will get for him. Even if he can disguise the military disaster, the results of the sanctions are already impossible to ignore and will only get worse.

His only salvation now is to rally his people to the flag, and the only real chance he has to do that is to frame this as Russia in grave peril from the evil West. He really needs Nato to get stuck in and escalate things so that this narrative has a ring of truth to it. From here on in, he will try to draw us into the conflict with ever more outrageous acts. He will bomb schools, he will bomb hospitals and he won’t rule out chemical weapons either.

The only way out of this is for Putin himself to be taken out of the picture, the only people who can do that are Russian, and the only way they are likely to do it is if they feel the pain of economic ruin. Sanctions will work. We must stick to them and give them time.