Silent Putin Learns From Kiev Misstep to Regain Sway

Vladimir Putin’s efforts to regain influence in Ukraine after the leader he campaigned for was overthrown will be quiet and less extreme than anything like military action, analysts from Moscow to London said.

Putin, who’s yet to comment publicly on the bloody ouster of Viktor Yanukovych last week, won’t risk inciting a backlash against Russia as he did in 2004 by interfering directly as Ukraine scrambles to form a government and elect a president, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies Putin and Russia’s elite at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.