Vladimir Putin is in real trouble
It’s gotten almost no coverage here in America, but Vladimir Putin is reportedly preparing to retire, and he’s trying to negotiate a non-prosecution deal on his way out the door. This story is being covered pretty heavily everywhere but America. We’re kind of in a bubble here, as we fixate on Trump’s final days. But it seems Trump’s downfall has put the early stages of Putin’s downfall in motion.
Keep in mind that President Biden is about to hit Russia with huge sanctions for meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and it’ll hit the oligarchs in the wallet. If they were to push Putin off the stage, they could use that as an argument for why the sanctions shouldn’t be so severe.
Putin supposedly has Parkinson’s. He also had a curiously timed coughing fit this week. He seems to be trying to take himself off the stage for “health reasons” before the Russian oligarchs sour on his failed Trump experiment and decide to take him out.
The mere fact that Putin wasn’t able to successfully rig the 2020 election for Trump is a sign that Putin doesn’t have the political muscle he did four years ago. So it’s not necessarily surprising that he may indeed be at or near his end. Putin is a lot smarter and savvier than Trump, so he’ll likely last longer than Trump – but at this rate, perhaps not all that much longer.
