Complaints about the president are growing among Russian military and business leaders. Now is the time for the west to turn up the heat <\/p>\n
As Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on the Kremlin. \u201cTen years of our presence,\u201d fumed the \u201cTwo Majors\u201d Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, \u201cdead Russian soldiers, billions of spent roubles and thousands of tonnes of ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.\u201d Some didn\u2019t shy away from lambasting Vladimir Putin. \u201cThe adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other \u2018geopolitical\u2019 endeavours of the Kremlin strategist.\u201d These weren\u2019t isolated incidents. Filter Labs, a data analytics company I collaborate with, saw social media sentiment on Syria dip steeply as Assad fell.<\/p>\n
It was in stark contrast to Putin\u2019s silly claim<\/a> at his annual news conference last week that Russia had suffered no defeat in Syria. Unlike social media, legacy media tried to walk the Kremlin line, but even here there were splits. \u201cYou can bluff on the international arena for a while \u2013 but make sure you don\u2019t fall for your own deceptions\u201d, ran an op-ed in the broadsheet Kommersant<\/em>, penned by a retired colonel close to the military leadership. He then used Syria as an example of how \u201cin today\u2019s world, victory is only possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what you do.\u201d Though the piece didn\u2019t mention Ukraine, Vasily Gatov, a media analyst at the University of Southern California, told me he thought it was a message from the general staff to the Kremlin: be realistic about what we can achieve in Ukraine, too.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Complaints about the president are growing among Russian military and business leaders. Now is the time for the west to turn up the heat As Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on the Kremlin. \u201cTen years of our presence,\u201d fumed the \u201cTwo Majors\u201d Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, \u201cdead … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}