Same stories @ The Washington Post:

I buy this analysis from this April 11 NYT reporting by Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow ("Feud Over Syria Missile Strike May Have an Upside for U.S. and Russia")

[....] The Kremlin has already signaled a certain degree of distance from Mr. Assad.

Speaking with The Associated Press last week, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said: “It is not correct to say that Moscow can convince Mr. Assad to do whatever is wanted in Moscow. This is totally wrong.”

Aleksandr Shumilin, head of the Center for Research of Middle Eastern Conflicts, said Mr. Putin was interested in weakening Russia’s dependence on Mr. Assad and did not want to feel responsible for all of his actions.

“The problem is that Russia cannot afford to distance itself in public, as Mr. Assad has already become a hero of the Russian television,” Mr. Shumilin said. “Therefore, on the surface the rhetoric will remain the same, but deep inside there will be efforts to establish some kind of a cooperation and mutual understanding.”

“They will try to calm the situation down,” he added [....]

It gets good back up from today's NYT article by Jim Rutenberg describing the current news media situation in general in Russia:  In Putin’s Moscow, a Pliant Press That Trump So Craves. This is good on getting across why Putin polls so strongly,, because of many years of nationalistic propaganda so that this is what happens;

[....] TV Rain has its own hard-luck tale. It was Russia’s only independent television station. Carried mainly on cable, it regularly covered anti-Putin protests and aired voices excluded from the rest of television.

But after it ran an online poll asking whether Russia should have abandoned Leningrad to the Nazis to save lives — deeply offending Russian national pride, and receiving a public rebuke from Mr. Putin’s top spokesman — its landlord evicted it and its cable carriers dropped it [....]