Has Vladimir Putin lost control of all of this?

| 11:32 pm EDT March 29, 2018
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Because Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s puppet, and because Trump is in the Oval Office, there are those who view Putin as winning. We’ve never seen it that way. Putin’s overriding goal was to get Obama-era U.S. sanctions against Russia eased. Not only has that not happened, Trump is having difficulty fending off even tougher sanctions against Russia being pushed by Congress. This is not a victory for Putin at all. His oligarchs are losing serious money, and they can’t be happy with him. Now the latest developments suggest that, as things have spiraled further out of control for him, Putin may have lost control of his own goons.

Putin has been very consistent about whom he’s willing to have murdered. Whether it be in Russia or elsewhere, Putin has only ever killed Russian nationals. The only exception has been his apparent murder of certain Ukrainian nationals, whom he wrongly considers to be Russians. Putin has never intentionally targeted foreign nationals, because for all his evil nature, he’s seemed to understand that it wasn’t a safe line to cross. He ended up crossing it by accident this month when he poisoned a Russian spy in the United Kingdom, and the poison ended up spreading to roughly twenty British nationals as well.

The fairly strong response we’ve seen from the British government, as well as from other Western nations, is a reminder of why Putin has never intentionally targeted foreign nationals. Putin is now looking at even harsher sanctions against Russia. Donald Trump can’t prevent other nations from hitting Putin in the pocketbook. Yet now NBC News is reporting that the hit list naming the poisoned Russian spy also named Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele. This changes everything.

Now we know that Vladimir Putin’s hitman was in fact looking to murder Christopher Steele, a British citizen. There are only two possibilities here. One is that Putin has become so desperate as his Trump experiment fails, he’s now willing to take the extraordinary risk of murdering a foreign national on foreign soil for the first time. The other is that Putin has lost control of his own goons, and they’re now just making up these attacks as they go along. Either way, Putin has never been more vulnerable.