Reports from Russia, and from some friends I’ve reached, speak to a widespread dismay and shame among younger, educated, urban Russians. Dismay because of the thousands who have been arrested in Russia for protesting the war; thousands of intellectuals and cultural figures have signed petitions against the invasion and carried out individual acts of courageous resistance. Novaya Gazeta, which was until this week the last functioning major opposition news outlet, wrote about a priest who dared to preach, “Brothers and sisters, this is a fratricidal war,” and was denounced to the police…

When the word spread that the invasion had begun, the brain drain became a rush for the doors. With flights to more than 30 countries now stopped, the twice-daily trains to Finland have been full, and many more Russians have being fleeing south to Georgia, where they don’t need a visa, or through Gulf States. Their stories are painfully similar, a sense that they have no future in a Russia that has been cast out of the civilized world, and that they are helpless to stop Mr. Putin. One friend, who had been visiting the United States, is applying for political asylum.

Not that Mr. Putin cares. He wields his power through a coterie of strongmen, the “siloviki,” who still view the world through the old Soviet prism of paranoia and ignorance. Many, like Mr. Putin, were officers in the security services, the elite shock troops of the omnipotent State. They never reconciled themselves to the loss of Russia’s status as a great power or bought into the notion that the people, the faceless “narod,” could be anything other than their subjects. And if the nettlesome liberal intelligentsia, or the new breed of wealthy business tycoons, didn’t like it, let them go.