Leon Aron at Foreign Policy writes:
The right foreign-policy move at the right time can boost a leader’s ratings and the regime’s popularity. This is doubly true for authoritarian regimes that lack democratic legitimacy, and it is true for Russia today.
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as one top pollster told me in Moscow a few weeks ago, “foreign policy is pretty much the only thing that works.” What he meant was that, with the country’s economy slowed to a crawl, and with the regime facing near-universal revulsion over the corruption, thievery, and incompetence of officials at every level, racking up foreign-policy successes has become vital to maintaining Putin’s popularity — which, in turn, is key to the legitimacy of the whole enterprise.
Read more at The Front Lines on Russia's Home Front.