Writing in The Japan Times (?) Leonid Bershidsky writes about how the war in Ukraine might end and why the kind of redevelopment that happened in Germany and Japan after World War II is essentially impossible for Russia. If you accept his premises I suspect he is correct.
Bershidsky doesn’t have a lot of insights about the nature of post-war Russia. He successfully (I believe) debunks some of the hopes about that outcome that have been expressed.
Russians fleeing the country in large numbers to avoid service is not the behavior of patriotic folk. What Bershidsky doesn’t deal with is the extent to which public sentiment in Russia may have changed in the post-Soviet period. I suspect that is the wild card whose value neither we nor the current leadership there fully understands, one which makes predicting outcomes especially haphazard.
