That crush any opposition are generally quite stable.

Merkel has even hired ex-Stasi to police Facebook posts.

It makes me laugh to see others pointing fingers when we have a media owned by six billionaires who restrict so much of what we get in the MSM.

MOSCOW — It’s not every day you see President Vladimir Putin with Joseph Stalin taking a break and counting wads of cash in a Moscow café. So a walk through GUM, a popular department store in Moscow, on a weekday afternoon may well force a double take.

A few months into his new job as a Putin impersonator, Siberian native Valentin Sergeyev continues to turn heads. His Putin — complete with receding hairline, dapper black suit and trademark sunglasses — is the newest addition to a host of lookalikes posing with tourists on Red Square.

“People come to me to bare their problems and concerns. Just look at how they react,” he says, breaking off to pose with two Chinese tourists. “I am Putin for them. They thank me for returning Crimea and making Russia great again.”

In GUM an elegant kiosk attracts a curious crowd. Black boxes of cologne decorated with the president’s profile stand neatly arranged in shiny glass cases. And below them are the words “Inspired by Vladimir Putin.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/1/24/putin-personality-cult-russians-obsessed.html

MOSCOW, Jan 25 Russia's economy contracted by 3.7 percent in 2015, preliminary data showed on Monday, with a slew of activity indicators suggesting the slump is far from over.

Russia is struggling to dig itself out of recession at a time when the price of oil, its main export, has seen a renewed plunge and as concerns about the global economy intensify.

Last year's 3.7 percent contraction was marginally better than a 3.8 percent decline predicted in a Reuters analysts' poll in December. However, other economic indicators published by the state statistics service on Monday showed continuing heavy falls and a deterioration compared with previous months.

Retail sales were down 15.3 percent year-on-year in December, in line with forecasts, after falling 13.1 percent in November.

http://www.reuters.com/article/russia-economy-idUSL8N15917O

Evelyn Farkas elaborates the Neocon argument. You have to admire such persistence.

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What precisely is the threat from Russia? Putin’s two main objectives—to keep himself in power and to rebuild Russia as a great power—do not in themselves endanger U.S. national interests. The threat lies in the fact that Putin is trying to achieve his goals by rewriting international rules and norms that are critical to U.S. security. Specifically, he seeks to inaugurate a new international order that permits human rights abuses by despotic leaders and invasion, occupation and political subversion of sovereign states. Not to mention assassination: Only last week, a British inquiry led by retired high court judge Robert Owen found that the murder of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was “probably” directed by the Russian president.

To permit this behavior to go unchallenged would mean the end of the post-World War II Westphalian, post- Cold War world order, which simultaneously enshrined territorial state sovereignty and human and minority rights. And we certainly can't let Russia weaken or destroy NATO, our most effective operational alliance, and our solidarity with Europe our biggest trading partner.

If Russia wins its aims outright—Ukraine remains ungovernable and territories in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova remain occupied, and Assad remains in power—Putin’s Kremlin will be emboldened to use military force again and again to achieve its foreign (and domestic) policy objectives. Your administration will need to do more with our allies and partners to prevent a resolution to ongoing or “frozen” conflicts that runs counter to the wishes of the people of those countries. This is not to say that we should not compromise in order to put an end to conflict and human suffering (especially in Syria), but we must structure our compromises so that they contain the path to, or at least, the possibility for future exercise of democratic political and territorial sovereignty.

The United States must counter and resist Russia’s actions though a combination of deterrence, strengthening our allies and partners and communicating the truth about the Kremlin’s actions to the international community. Your administration must strive to convince Russia that neo-Soviet adventurism on its periphery will not advance its interests; Russia cannot be allowed to prevail in Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, where its military occupations have led to so-called frozen conflicts that serve as a Russian veto on the policies of those countries. Russia can have influence on those countries, but it should be based on mutual sovereign agreement, not coercion.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/next-president-putin-pentagon-policy-213559

Evelyn Farkas?

And This?

Dominance games. There was a post yesterday in GD or one of those about Trump doing the same thing in the Republican primary. They should hire howler monkeys, they'd always "win". The power of a loud voice and never giving an inch.

I counted less than a paragraph before the "reasonableness" went out the window and the high dudgeon came back in, the petulance. "How dare he do to us what we were planning to do to him?"

But they have lost the argument at this point, they just have not given up yet.

Geopolitical expert George Friedman says the crude oil price collapse is “hollowing out” an already stretched Russian government budget. He gives the country two years before economic forces begin tearing it apart, much like the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

Putin is Losing His Main Political Weapon

Speaking in a Mauldin Economics Interview, Friedman said the key to his forecast is Moscow’s recent decision to suspend foreign aid loans. These loans are one of Vladimir Putin’s main tools for maintaining the appearance of Russian power around the world. Losing them could cost Russia influence. Worse, former clients of Russia might turn to the U.S. for aid.

Moreover, the move is impossible to hide from the Russian public. Putin has worked hard to preserve national spirit by, for instance, intervening in the Syria conflict. The fact that he is letting the public see this weakness suggests the budget situation is dire indeed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/george-friedman-putin-more-dangerous-than-ever-2016-1

Russia beat Saudi Arabia as China's top crude oil supplier in December 2015 for the fourth month in a row due to robust demand from independent Chinese refiners, which prefer shipments from the Far East over high-sulfur oil from the Middle East.

Russia strengthened its position in Asia by supplying nearly one-quarter more crude to the region in 2015, shifting the balance of power in one of the few bright spots in the global market and blunting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' high-profile drive as to win customers.

China is one of the top targets for Russian oil after small, independent oil plants known as "teapots" won the right to import crude for the first time just several months ago. These plants were busy placing orders toward the end of 2015.

"These new plants were in a rush to use new quotas. But logistically they are not equipped to buy larger shipments from the Middle East or West Africa," said a Beijing-based official involved in marketing Middle Eastern oil. "Russian cargoes … suit them."

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/965782.shtml

Their army’s equipment and strategy was “outmoded”; their air force’s bombs and missiles were “more dumb than smart”; their navy was “more rust than ready”. For decades, this was Western military leaders’ view, steeped in condescension, of their Russian counterparts. What they have seen in Syria and Ukraine has come as a shock.

Russian military jets have, at times, been carrying out more sorties in a day in Syria than the US-led coalition has done in a month. The Russian navy has launched ballistic missiles from the Caspian Sea 900 miles way, and kept supply lines going to Syria. The air defences installed by the Russians in Syria and eastern Ukraine would make it extremely hazardous for the West to carry out strikes against the Assad regime or Ukrainian separatists.

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the commander of the US army in Europe, has described Russian advances in electronic warfare in Syria and Ukraine – a field in which they were typically supposed to be backward – as “eye watering”.

The chief of US Air Force operations in Europe and Africa, Lieutenant General Frank Gorenc, has disclosed that Moscow is now deploying anti-aircraft systems in Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed from Ukraine last year, and in Kaliningrad, an enclave between Lithuania and Poland. It is doing so, he says, in a way that makes it “very, very difficult” for Nato planes to gain access safely to areas including parts of Poland.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/war-in-syria-russia-s-rustbucket-military-delivers-a-hi-tech-shock-to-west-and-israel-a6842711.html

There's no real alternative people would embrace.

It has a lot of severe problems, but those problems are likely to remain fairly constant.

Societies don't collapse, governments don't fall, revolutions do not begin, in a simple mechanical and predictable process. The only thing that is really safe to say is that when things are going well, such things are rare and usually the result of some new factor coming into play, invasion, disease, catastrophe of some sort.

Not predictable even in principle.

There are heuristics you can apply, as with US election predictors of various sorts for example, but they commonly fail in societies under outside assault, there are many examples of that these days.

But the point is that assaulting a society to change the government shows a failure to grasp the situation, if you want to change a government by assault, you will have to invade, as we did Germany for example in WWII, or Iraq in 2003.

But that's very expensive, so people use disguised assaults these days, economic and political methods rather than organized military.

Unfortunately, this often seems to have a destabilizing effect, you get rid of the offending government, but the prize is not what it once was either, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and it is now ungovernable.

But that only works if the assault is disguised, and in the modern internet connected world that is hard to do.

So it's a lose lose lose lose kind of deal.

Lose lose lose lose.

Rather, they want to constrain and modify the international behavior of Russia.

By any account, a successor regime would be worse--Zhironovsky or the Communists.

the point isn't to kill the bear but to keep the bear in its cage

Mr. Kerry has done some yeoman work of late, and Obama has been unwilling to humor the War Party near as much as they would like, but there is nobody else I have much to say for.