How Best To Describe Russia Today

© Sputnik/ Sergey Guneev

John Lloyd, Reuters: What is the best way to describe Vladimir Putin’s Russia?

In January of this year, a British judge, Robert Owen, said that Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, was ‘probably’ a murderer. The victim, nearly a decade before, had been Alexander Litvinenko, a former Soviet, then Russian, intelligence officer who had defected to the UK, became a part-time consultant to the UK’s MI6 foreign intelligence service and had been poisoned by two other former Russian intelligence officers in a London hotel.

Owen had been tasked with doing a report on the murder. His flat statement that Putin was likely to have been the instigator went further than expected, and brought some relief to Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who — with her husband — had always believed that the president had marked out the former spy for punishment.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: What's my description of Russia today .... a resignation that the economy will remain flat and that relations with the the U.S. and Western Europe will stay in a deep freeze until the crisis in Ukraine is solved (which it will not be). As for politics .... an acceptance that Putin will win the Presidential election in two years, but only because the alternatives are not what the people want.

On a side note .... this Reuters post quotes Ekho Moskvy who says that within Putin's inner circle there are only two men that he really counts on .... Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, and Sergey Ivanov, head of the Presidential Administration. I am not going to go into details, but I concur with this analysis.