Putin's "cunning plan" has now reached the uncanny point at which a victory for the Kremlin would be nothing more than persuading Russian people that Ukrainian fascists in power are actually true partners of the Kremlin

As recently as a month ago, the zealous propagandists of Putin's cunning plans and defenders of the "wisdom" of Minsk argued that, sooner than expected, the Kremlin will pull off some magic trick or/and the junta will quickly collapse on its own and Ukraine will be again pro-Russia and, as Starikov argued still in August, Russia will "win back the whole of Ukraine"--to liberate Slavyansk or Mariupol is not good enough, it is too little and so they are not going to be liberated. Through uncanny and cunning diplomatic moves, Putin will win all that back, if he is just allowed to play it without hindrance--all, which, when 15 years in power, he let the Nazis to grab without much as a whimper. Now, with the Normandy 4 meeting in Paris behind us, the Kremlin no longer even tries to pretend that it tries to win anything in Ukraine or Donbass. But what it has been trying to do very systematically and forcefully has been ever thicker and thicker pretending that the fascists are in power in Kiev and that Ukraine is not a fascist country now. Minsk is thus forcing the Kremlin to go for ever more and more unprincipled, principle-less positions and posture with bigger and bigger twisting, hypocrisy, and lies, while having to make a case to the Russian people that, 70 years after the Great Patriotic War and the victory over Nazism, Nazism (in its current Ukrainian form) is not that bad and that it is not even fascism--just "Ukraine" with certain, undefined "internal constraints" as Putin recently called it.