Putin does not believe that Ukraine's strike campaign can break Russian society. He reads it as a Western attempt to make his position fragile, and he is drawing conclusions from that reading which are not the ones being anticipated in Western capitals.

The new R.Politik Bulletin, No. 13 (187), is out today.

The assumption underpinning current Western policy is that mounting pressure will eventually bring Putin to the negotiating table. Trump has said publicly that the strikes on Russian refineries are "an escalation that can help lead to an end". Moscow's reply, and more importantly its private calculation, points the other way. The bulletin sets out what the Kremlin actually concludes from the pressure it is under, why that conclusion produces an incentive to escalate rather than to soften, and where the escalation is most likely to go next as the geography of the war widens.

The fuel crisis has become the central issue of Russian politics, and the authorities are managing it in a way that tells you a great deal about how the system now works under strain. The bulletin explains what is being decided, by whom, and what the Kremlin expects the political cost to be before the September vote.

Andrei Melnichenko's essay in The Economist has been read in incompatible ways: as a declaration of loyalty, as a text written in the presidential administration and merely signed, as a businessman breaking with the war. R.Politik's reading differs from all of them. Even if it changes nothing in practice, the essay may mark the beginning of something consequential for the fate of the regime. The bulletin sets out what it is actually proposing, and who its real addressee is.

The same pressures run through the rest of the issue: Lukashenko's narrowing room for manoeuvre between Moscow and Kyiv; the pre-election congresses and what United Russia's list reveals about the Kremlin's read on its own society; the arrests around the Rotenberg brothers and what is really being contested there; and Moscow's decision to install an outsider in South Ossetia for the first time since 2008.

R.Politik Bulletin No. 13 (187) examines how these decisions are taken under pressure.