Putin is a very good player, but I would rather call him a poker player. In poker, you can win by playing with a very weak hand, but you can bluff; you can raise the stakes, and you should be a good reader of opponents' minds. Again, he was a good KGB agent who proved to be a very efficient mind reader of many foreign leaders, winning their trust and their confidence, and eventually, of course, betraying them.
Putin always plays with a weak hand. Russia today is a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, militarily or economically, but Putin knows the rules of his gamesmanship: how to blackmail, how to intimidate, how to threaten. He always expects his opponents, even those having a very strong hand, to fold the cards.
Regarding my answer to your question about further repression, look, my friend Boris is dead. Most people who fought with me in Russia, those who were part of those big demonstrations in 2011-2012, are either in exile like me or in jail or worse. What is left in Russia is a very scarce group of people who represent no real danger to the regime, and that's why the regime allows them to just do little things.
We know that the Putin regime has reached the point where it will not go down from internal dissent unless it's being provoked by foreign-born defeat. It's like the Soviet Union retreating from Afghanistan. Unlike the Americans in 1975, the retreat was orderly. Russians were not fleeing Afghanistan, so there was no panic. They even left the Najibullah regime, the pro-Moscow regime there, for three more years. Still, what people in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic states, and even in Russia saw was that the empire was no longer striking. The empire was retreating. After February 15, 1989, how long did the Soviet Union survive? Not for long.
Anything that could help to demonstrate that Putin is not invincible, that Russia under Putin is not a global player but is a country that is suffering from a poor economy and deteriorating living standards, that only Putin's buddies and close friends could be beneficiaries of this corrupt, aggressive regime—anything that will weaken Putin's image in the eyes of ordinary Russians, but even more importantly, in the eyes of the Russian elite, may lead to unpredictable consequences.
I'm not telling you that I know when Putin is going to lose power. Most likely, for a dictator like Putin, losing power means losing everything else, so he's not going to retire. That's bad news. The good news is that he also doesn't know.
You can bring this moment closer. Again, you should not be afraid of warnings that if Putin goes down, it could be worse. What could be worse? When I hear this argument, my blood boils. You look at Syria. What could be worse? There are 500,000 dead, 10 million refugees. The European political system is in trouble. There's a rise of terrorism. What could be worse than stopping potential intervention in 2011 or 2012 because we were afraid of the consequences?
Yes, Putin's collapse means the collapse of the system, because it's a one-man show. It's not a politburo; it's just a one-man dictatorship. I would rather have some chaotic development instead of the quiet graveyard.
With Putin, we know the outcome. Every day he stays in power, he will inflict more damage to what is left of Russian society. He will continue his aggressive foreign policy, and God knows who will be the next target. He will not stop. There's no way that you can offer him some concessions or appeasement. He'll take it. He'll take it, and then he'll move on, because he has to move. It's a rule of his engagement. His survival will require more and more concessions, and at a certain point he will cross the border, and then you will have to be involved in a much bigger confrontation.