Belton: I’m afraid it’s not, clearly not having too much impact on Putin’s own calculus. And I guess the question is really: To what degree is he now just acting all by himself? Because I actually can’t imagine for an instance that his decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was supported by a majority of his own top officials. And you could see that on their faces when he held that Security Council meeting on Monday. You could see the fear in their eyes, and that really they didn’t want to be there. They all looked deeply uncomfortable.

And I think for many in Moscow, Putin’s actions this week have come as a great shock. I think many were preparing for him to maybe, yes, recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk because already, since 2015, de facto they’ve been independent anyway. They were held by separatists backed by the Kremlin, and this was just making a de facto situation de jure.

And it would have allowed Putin to kind of walk out. He’s taken, yet another little slice of Ukraine. He could continue to perhaps menace from the borders and threaten [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky in an attempt to gain concessions from Zelensky and maybe from NATO on missile shields and so on. No one expected him to go this far and you can see that in the reaction of the Russian stock market for instance, … it lost half its value immediately after the invasion.