We haven't taken a look-in at the Russia-Ukraine war recently. Now The Atlantic weighs in with an opinion piece authored by Greg Yudin, a Russian academic, reprinted at the msn.com site.
Yudin is either suicidally brave or the repression of dissent in Russia has been overstated. See what he concludes:
Prigozhin's aborted march on Moscow made clear that Putin was no longer the arbiter of a conflict among warlords; He was himself a part of the conflict which was why not he, but Belarus's President Aleksandr Lukashenko, served as its mediator.
Although the two forces at odds on Saturday could hardly be classified as supporters versus opponents of the war in Ukraine, the deeper import of their standoff is the unspoken acknowledgment that the invasion, and with it Russia, has reached a dead end.
Nobody has a working plan, all responsibility is delegated, and the president keeps doing what is clearly not working, while his power gradually erodes. Russia is reckoning with the fact that it cannot continue like this.
This puts me in mind of a famous wisecrack by economist Herbert Stein, who concluded, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
