Vladimir Putin built his brutal Russian regime on lies. Like all dictators, Putin prefers to be see as a legitimate ruler, governing in the name of his subjects. Since that story cannot withstand even the briefest scrutiny, he must fabricate some information and obscure the rest. Control of all media outlets therefore lies at the heart of his power, because Russians must only receive news he selects or they would very quickly become angry and unmanageable.
The rest of the world is not under his thumb, however, and neither is empirical reality. This fundamental truth always proves to be the death of dictatorship and totalitarianism in the end. In the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 17, Putin wants to maintain the fiction that he and his minions bear no responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of civilians flying 30,000 feet over the Ukrainian war zone, that any suggestion that they are at fault comes from a worldwide conspiracy to weaken Russia, and that the cause of truth and justice depends on Russia and its supporters. By many indications, Russian citizens, consuming Putin's own version of events, buy this narrative and continue to support Putin. But European and American citizens and their governments have access to the truth, and so demand that Putin behave more like a decent human being.
As a result, Putin is in trouble. As Stratfor analyst George Friedman writes, since the airplane was shot down "Putin then moves from being an effective, sophisticated ruler who ruthlessly uses power to being a dangerous incompetent supporting a hopeless insurrection with wholly inappropriate weapons. And the West, no matter how opposed some countries might be to a split with Putin, must come to grips with how effective and rational he really is." At some point, the real world intrudes on even the most tightly controlled places, and it has come rushing into Moscow in the last few days. we can only hope that it forces serious change in Russia relatively quickly.
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