"It is a big sum of money in the context of a police force where I want to get more uniformed officers back on the beat - it is a stark choice that has to be made, " he said.
Its civilian and uniformed leaders have exercised disproportionate influence in joint deliberations while Air Force leaders were being purged and replaced.
The bombing is also a nice illustration of the fact that Putin is not, as rather uniformed people occasionally suggest, some kind of omnipotent and omniscient force of malevolence, and that his grip on the country is highly variable (very tight in some places, exceedingly weak in others).