Don't know that I buy it.

It'll go like this. Putin will be dispised and offensive as long as he's doing things the West doesn't like.

Nobody'll like his support for Assad. Just as in Ukraine, by shipping a lot of Chechens, Ossetians, and upstart Russians of every ethnicity out he'll help cut down on the number of irate, poorly socialized males that might create problems.

However, once he runs out of non-ISIS folk to help crush with Iranian support, then he'll fight ISIS and everybody will be happy. ISIS doesn't need to be killed. It just needs to be humbled and oppressed. It won't make great headway in Russia because Putin's been building, for the last decade, a "Russian Islam." Appointing the right imams with the right training, openly meddling with what can and cannot be preached, buying and subverting scholars and such. It's not a secret, and it's advice he's given to other leaders in public.

If part of ISIS remains in the Salafist Sunni hinterland, so much the better. Let the Kurds and Salafists annoy Turkey and Iraq--as long as ISIS knows that it's better to severely annoy the West and its allies instead of being seen as a potential tickle to Russia, that's how that'll swing.

The Ukraine will go the way of Abkhazia and S. Ossetia, with a difference: it'll be more like Transdnistria. Why? Because Georgia without the two breakaway portions works and they're independent. Transnistria is nominally independent, but it's far too integrated with Moldova and felt to be far too much a part of Moldova. The LNR and DNR are more useful as parts of Ukraine than to suffer the fate of the Crimea, and far too expensive to assimilate. It's a frozen conflict, carefully frozen, which is exactly what Obama and the West said would not happen. There it is.

Having the breakaway parts of the Donbas stay part of Ukraine in peace is crucial. Then there'll be the path to Crimea for goods and services and water and electricity without the expense of ferrying it in or rush-building a bridge. The point will have been made, and the Hutsuls humbled, showing the former parts of Imperial Russia how not to play the game--and it's best to not try.

Russia can handle the currency problems. It's $-based thinking, with money as the root of all values, that's corrupting.