protested, and the kremlin hit back, and everybody is basically now in jail, and exiled abroad, or very quietly trying not to end up on either of those places. this is a country where people go to jail for liking things on facebook, for sharing other peoples posts on facebook, for sharing music videos that they themselves did not make. so what happens is when you establish that climate of fear, there is no pushback. there is nobody that he has to deal with, not the opposition, and not even anybody in his own government. i can 2014, there were still liberals and western oriented people in his government. now, as we saw with the security council meeting yesterday which looked like a deleted scene from death of stalin, you just had the people around him bowing and scraping to say whatever he needed him to say, getting scolded when they stumbled and did not quite get the formulation right, and he is just surrounded by yes men. i remember one of my trips to moscow back in 2018, meeting with a kremlin reporter who said these people have no idea what's actually going on in the population. they think everything is great. and they are totally informational-y isolated. that was before covid. before putin started making everybody, even his close friends and allies