Now the war is faltering, maybe he needs an excuse to keep it going, maybe he needs to keep up popular support. If suspects are too quickly caught, arrested, and successfully tried, this option will win favor. Putin has made noises about wanting to negotiate an end to it. If anyone in the army wants to prevent this from happening, this would be the way to do it. Beyond that, speculation can only get wilder.
Any possibility sounds as wild as the next.
And I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about any of them, either. They are being ground to a husk in an insurgent conflict that they surely know they cannot win. Only a military fool would desire a continuation of the current sorry state of affairs. Anne Applebaum, a journalist based in London and Warsaw, is a regular contributor to the London Sunday Telegraph and is at work on a history of Soviet concentration camps. All rights reserved.