pcr isn't optimistic about the direction the putin is taking russia;

Will Russia Collapse in 2025?

Paul Craig Roberts

Is Putin’s Government Trying to Be a 19th century liberal government in the brutal evil world of the 21st century?

I raise this question not only because Putin has been fighting in his gentlemanly way a war on Russian territory in Ukraine for six months longer without yet winning than it took Stalin’s Red Army to defeat the formidable German Wehrmacht in World War II, and still Putin has not cleared Ukrainian troops from the small Donbas area or from the Ukrainian invasion of Russian Kursk.  Does anyone remember when Putin declared that Russia would never again fight a war on its own territory? Putin has been fighting a war on Russia’s own territory for longer than the Soviet offensive took to drive the German invaders out of Russia.  Moreover, Putin and Lavrov seem to be relying on Trump, not the Russian military, to bring the conflict in Ukraine to an end by agreeing to a mutual security treaty.

None of Putin’s declarations have had any effect on Washington’s determination to further breakup Russia, a constraint on American hegemony. Neither have any of the super weapons that Putin has waved in the face of the West. Putin’s reliance on useless “agreements,” such as the Minsk Agreement and the Astana Agreement that sunk Syria, together with Putin’s clamps on the Russian military in Donbas, has convinced Washington that Putin will not fight. Washington finds it extraordinary that it took Putin eight years after Washington’s coup in Kiev, which placed a Washington Puppet in charge of Ukraine, to come to grips with the fact that he had a problem, deceived as he was by his useless Minsk Agreement.........more.........