PARIS (AP) — What does NATO’s top expert expect from Vladimir Putin after the despot won his fifth six-year term as Russia’s president on Sunday?
“An ocean of tyranny and bloodshed,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda told The Daily Beast, before echoing his diagnosis to some 1,300 army officers and policymakers gathered for the Paris Strategy and Defense Forum. a way to paralyze Putin’s march against Western democracies without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Nausėda verdict: “Russia will stop,” he says. This can only be stopped. “
But who’s going to save it?
This question has been echoed in Putin’s 24 years of malevolent rule. Russians who have an answer are either dead or in exile, seeking to avoid liquidation. The Kremlin continues to strictly enforce culture Z. Fighting Putin on social media is a veritable troll fest. And let’s face it: As we enter the third year of Putin’s Ukrainian onslaught, we are at a loss for words to describe the gruesome and informal nature of his carnage, which Nausėda calls “genocidal. “”.
The annihilation of an ethnic group? This is the law. Alert the legally exhausted prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and they will quote Cicero: inter arma enim Silent Leges – In times of war, the law is silent.
So if you’d like to delve deeper into the Putin phenomenon – which is now largely guaranteed to last until 2030 – there’s nothing new here.
If Russia’s existing presidential polls are reliable (and even if they aren’t, the sheer breadth of the margin determines the numbers themselves), Putin will get 70 to 80 percent of the rigged votes in a country that has never had a weak vote. or fair elections.
If President Joe Biden had a crusading staff as complicated as the one that manages the Kremlin’s accounts, he wouldn’t be floating in the whirlwind of Putin’s winged ape body: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, far-right Dutchman Geert Wilders, fascist Marine Le Pen, and MAGA mafia boss. Donald Trump. There is a new Weasel Axis in a position to take over the world stage.
Indeed, many NATO officials who spoke here off the record were surprised that Putin’s most sensible TV propagandist, Vladimir Soloviev, recently persuaded millions of people that Trump and Putin, once re-elected presidents respectively, would in combination offer Hungary the Ukrainian Carpathians as soon as Kiev fell under control. Guardianship. Russian control.
Putin and his cronies are still incredibly wealthy. The Magnitsky Act of 2012 and 2016, aimed at sanctioning and freezing the budget of perpetrators of human rights abuses in Russia, failed, but “Navalny” won the Oscar for top production documentary in 2023. Ukraine is rationing weapons and ammunition, and the U. S. intelligence community’s 2024 annual risk assessment concludes, “Moscow has managed to divert as much of its oil exports as possible through the sea. “
The diabolical style of Putin’s Russia remains unchanged. It’s a corrupt and incompetent parody of a political system, but that’s what big business is made of.
Libraries of books have been written about how Putin spent more than two decades murdering rivals at home and abroad with impunity. Film vaults are filled with images of Wall Street and its global regulators allowing Kremlin mayors to execute bloody monetary transactions on sanctioned global markets. In fact, the U. S. Congressional Records include testimony about Putin’s efforts to destabilize U. S. elections, bribe officials, and weaponize immigrants and other displaced people in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
“Imagine Putin’s foreign policy strategy session; I do it for educational purposes,” says a former CIA agent, who spent a decade normally undercover in Russia. “Deceive, disturb, disturb, disturb, divide, and create distrust, suspicion, and conspiracy theories. Sell vranyo; Sell. The public buys it.
And you don’t have to be Russian to swallow the product. Nearly a portion of Americans think the U. S. is spending too much money to fight Putin. Even Pope Francis preaches that Ukraine has the “courage” to raise the “white flag. “
Carlos Galán, who has spent the past decade reading the Kremlin’s data manipulation and hybrid warfare techniques at Madrid’s Nebrija University, told NATO’s most sensitive top brass that they had a better perception that the West had yet figured out a way to defeat Putin off the battlefield.
“Putin publishes lots and lots of national and global propaganda materials,” Galán says. “The number of these teams is increasing day by day. “
“Putin’s propaganda operation is the Hydra of the 21st century,” Galán adds, referring to the mythical many-headed beast killed by Hercules. “Cut off one head and two new ones will grow. The Hydra is poisonous and it’s not going away. “.
Stopping the re-elected Putin remains an odious and confusing task and, as NATO commanders say, without giving Ukraine an improbable amount of weapons to accomplish the task. This is nothing new either. Putin will return to the Kremlin on Monday morning, fueling the madness that everything is right when everything is wrong. Galán says that many people are going to eat it.
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