Putin has assumed the West will get bored and give up eventually. And Russia can just wait it out.
But, the West is getting to defang Russia for a generation, exfiltrate its best and brightest, and set itself up perfectly for out-competing Russia in the northern passages opening up due to climate change in the coming decades.
I’m wearing a St. Javelin tshirt as I write this, but NATO can’t have member countries with the levels of endemic corruption that have existed in Ukraine and are still being rooted out. Shit, Resnikov himself was seen to be only one step away from it in the past year.
His flexible quickness of wit was incredibly impressive in the ‘80s and early-‘90s.
But, he’s become brittle. You can see it in his interviews and conversations now, where he often makes interlocutors repeat something before understanding it and responding to it, even though it was said clearly.
I suspect he’s lost a few steps and is running mostly on muscle-memory these days. He has lost the flexibility of thinking to make truly insightful jokes; he relies instead of stereotypes and is irritated that those stereotypes are increasingly being rejected by the left.
By design