Does Vladmir Putin Have The Testicular Fortitude To Invade Ukraine?
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The world waits with bated breath
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sees himself as the modern day Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. A romantic figure destined to capture the former glories of a once great nation.
As an intelligence officer stationed in East Germany during the cold war, Vladimir Putin witnessed firsthand the disintegration of communism and by extension, Soviet Russia into complete irrelevance.
The unravelling of Soviet Russia, first into the commonwealth of independent states (CIS) and then into nation states such as Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Ukraine and countries that most people on this planet will never have heard of must have filled an ardent nationalist like Putin with great dismay.
One suspects that this deep sense of loss will have been compounded by the economic woes that befell Russia in the late 1990s, when it couldn’t pay its debts, thus leading to a default, which shook the global economy to its very core.
We shouldn’t also forget that the seminal events of 1998 did lead to the creation of a new class in Russia — the Oligarchs — among whom were the likes of Leo Blavatnik, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and perhaps the most famous of them all, Roman Abrahamovic, who took full advantage of their country’s economic collapse by buying national assets on the cheap.
For it was in those unique circumstances, that Vladimir Putin was born.
In that supremely Machiavellian head of his, one imagines, He would have said: Never again, would Russia capitulate to the west, never again would we play second fiddle to anyone in the world.
And this thinking allied to his years as a spy, ensured that he would climb the greasy pole to rise to the very top of public life, replacing the utterly useless and perpetually inebriated Boris Yeltsin.
To the oligarchs, who had been used to bending the world to their will, they catastrophically underestimated the new man; Berezovsky and his chums must have thought that it would be business as usual, but they go it wrong.
Those who dared to criticize him found themselves out muscled and stripped of their assets and in…
