Vladimir Putin makes his big move as Donald Trump circles the drain

| 3:00 pm EST November 25, 2018
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By now it’s clear that Vladimir Putin had two priorities when he destabilized the United States by rigging the 2016 election and installing his own puppet as its illegitimate “President.” One was the reduction of U.S. sanctions against Russia, which would have been worth billions to Putin and his oligarchs. The other was Putin’s longstanding desire to invade and take over the rest of Ukraine.

By now it’s clear that Putin is never getting the reduced sanctions he was seeking. The best Donald Trump has been able to do for him is to fend off most of the increased sanctions that Congress has tried to enact against Russia, in retaliation for the rigged election. Now that Robert Mueller is about to close in, and the Democrats are about to take over the House, Trump is now circling the drain. Trump’s only remaining usefulness is that he’s preventing the U.S. from having an actual President. Accordingly, Putin is taking advantage of that while he still can.

As we speak, Russia is launching to launch a naval battle against Ukraine. It’s an obvious pretext for Russia invading mainland Ukraine, after having already seized Crimea a few years back. Today’s aggression is serious enough that Ukraine is calling for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, in the hope that international leaders will threaten Russia with retaliation.

So why is this happening now? That’s not difficult to parse. We’re in a holding period in which Donald Trump is a sitting duck waiting to be finished off, but the Democrats won’t have control of the House for another five weeks, meaning there is almost literally no President of the United States. Putin surely knows the Trump experiment has failed and won’t last much longer. He knows he’ll never get those sanctions eased. So he’s preparing to try to take Ukraine while he still can. Will the international community be able to stop him without any help from the U.S.?