Vladimir Putin has been on a brutal, bloody rampage, on a level not seen since the terrorizing reign of Josef Stalin. And why not? He became accustomed to getting away with murder – literally – ever since he found his soul mate in the 45th President of the United States.

 

It’s no mystery why Don and Vlad fell in love with one another: 1) They both love politics as theatre, and 2) they both operate from a place of low self-esteem and, as a result, profound weakness (really, does anyone with a high self-esteem emerge from scuba-diving, in front of television cameras, holding two very rare ancient Greek urns he just happened to randomly “find” on his dive, or ride around shirtless on a horse like Putin does?)…and Donald’s weaknesses and insecurities could fill an entire book.

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It’s safe to say that no foreign state benefited more from the first Trump administration’s antics than Russia and, for Putin, the timing could not have been better. When Donald Trump took the oath of office the first time, Russia’s economy was shrinking – strangled by slow growth and depressed wages – and the war in Syria was becoming more costly every day. Putin was also having to navigate between increasingly demanding factions within Russia, like the Russian Orthodox Church, oligarchs, and the security forces.

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The Russian people were demanding more freedom, and more of them than ever before believed their politicians were corrupt. The standard of living was falling, and Russia was more repressed than it had been since the days of the Soviet Union. Even super rich people were getting twitchy.

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Enter Donald Trump, his authoritarian tendencies, and the complete chaos that his first administration inflicted on practically every aspect of American life. For Putin, an unreliable, divided, angry United States fed perfectly into the narrative he had been trying to sell about America for years. It was more than Putin could possibly have hoped for when he long dreamed of discrediting American democracy: a U.S. president who insulted American allies and threatened the free press; ditched international agreements; maligned NATO; and smeared America’s institutions, military, judicial system and intelligence agencies.

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Putin delighted in the opportunity to undermine trust in the United States and question our moral authority. He lived for moments like that fateful news conference during the 2018 Russia–United States summit in Helsinki, Finland, when the President of the United States stood right beside him and chose to publicly believe his obviously bogus denial of Russian interference in our elections over the exhaustive investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies.

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That said, even with this new ammunition against America, Putin saw his popularity continue to decline. In fact, in 2020 anti-government protests began to swell across Russia – even in small towns 4,000 miles away from Moscow. The economic fallout from the pandemic and global collapse in oil prices certainly weren’t helping matters, as many Russian families were close to losing everything.

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Putin’s solution? To double-down on authoritarianism. By the end of 2020, Putin’s regime had passed laws that severely cracked down on opposition in any form, including peaceful protests, as well as laws that curtail certain Internet sites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Putin now enjoys immunity from prosecution for the rest of his life, and almost all information, however trivial, regarding members of his family, friendship circle, and government is now considered classified.

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Meanwhile, Putin was busy poisoning his opposition, including former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and Alexei Navalny, who was the Kremlin’s most visible opposition figure and who, having survived his 2020 assassination attempt, was locked in a Russian prison in 2021, where he eventually “died” three years later. Navalny’s message particularly resonated with many Russians because it focused on Putin’s – or as Navalny so perfectly described him, the “little thieving man in the bunker” – corruption. Putin was so threatened by Navalny’s political movement that he had a Russian court designate the group an “extremist network.” This meant that the group’s organizers, donors and supporters could arbitrarily be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at any time.

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Vladimir Putin must be stopped. Taken separately, his war crimes in Ukraine; his interference in our elections; the cyberattacks he has waged and sanctioned against us; his poisoning of pro-democracy opposition leaders; bullying behavior in places like Moldova, South Ossetia, Montenegro, and the Balkan; the annexation of Crimea; and the slaughtering of innocent civilians in opposition-held areas in northwest Syria with his now ousted buddy Bashar al-Assad would each independently warrant brutal consequences. Together, they are just completely unacceptable and must not go unanswered.

 

Enough is enough with this guy.