I am not as optimistic about the demise of Putin despite the scale of the crisis and brutality he has unleashed As much as I hate to hear it, there seems to be signs that their is a growing support for Putin among the Russian citizenship. Nothing like a crisis to rally the troops.

Alas, it is hard to intelligently know how all this plays out. All the news is so politicized with a lot of speculative theories being espoused as truth. Even our own intelligence sources, which should be above politics, have predisposed biases. The old saying goes, the first casualty in any war is the truth.