Putin was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off

Definitely an interesting analysis.

If you are in the business of dethroning America as hegemon of the world liberal order, the last thing you want to do is actually to dethrone America, because then you have to confront the question of what happens next. Russia has long pretended to be America’s rival for power, while all along it has actually been America’s annoying little brother. Putin has only been able to do what he’s done because, in a scrap, America would always have his back in the playground. If that is no longer the case, Putin is in trouble.

I’ll explain. Putin did not start out as a world-strutting Bond villain. He began, in 1999, as an ex-spook from St Petersburg, newly arrived in Moscow, keen to make Russia great again, looking for all the help he could get... a committed multilateralist.

 Putin’s clever diplomacy and firm grip on the reins, combined with a lucky spell of high oil prices, meant he could pay Russians their pensions on time, resurface the roads, defeat the Chechens, take on and defeat the over-mighty oligarchs. Russians travelled with their newly earned wealth, however, and they realised that, although Moscow had improved markedly, it was still a long way behind Paris, London or Berlin. And, ungrateful that they were, they blamed Putin for their straitened circumstances, as well as the friends of his who had become billionaires from the state contracts he tossed their way. In the winter of 2011, Muscovites protested and suddenly Putin looked unpopular, which he could not stand.

He needed someone to blame, so he blamed America... In the Kremlin’s telling, America opposed Putin not because he was an all-time kleptocrat, but because he was a rival for world power. Putin pitched himself as a global insurgent, a rival to the liberal order, and it proved remarkably popular with an electorate reared on the cold war.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/05/not-what-putin-planned-trump?CMP=share_btn_gp