“We can be certain that Putin will mount a counteroffensive to try to reclaim that territory,” Cohen said. “I think our expectation is that that will be a difficult fight for the Russians.”
Putin, he said, “is not only going to have to face the fact that there is a front line now within Russian territory that he’s going to have to deal with, he has to deal with reverberations back in his own society that they have lost a piece of Russian territory.”
Putin didn’t care about optics in Beslan or at the Dubrovka Theater. He can control what the media knows about this, and even if villages are destroyed he can just blame the Ukrainians.