The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one.”. .

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I cringe at the ignorance being spewed by U.S. politicians and pundits about Vladimir Putin. He is characterized as a new Hitler and/or a new Stalin. Garbage. Those making such claims expose themselves as uneducated fools who apparently studied history by watching Hollywood movies

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- “Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, “de-democratized” a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet “totalitarianism.”
- “Nor did Putin then make himself a Tsar or Soviet-like “autocrat,” which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy.”
-“Putin is not a Kremlin leader who “reveres Stalin” and whose “Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
-“Nor did Putin create post–Soviet Russia’s “kleptocratic economic system,” with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin’s shock-therapy “privatization” schemes of the 1990s, when the “swindlers and thieves” still denounced by today’s opposition actually emerged.”
-“Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as “a KGB thug,” regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a “mafia state boss.” This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it. And yet, it is ubiquitous. ”

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America, along with many in Western Europe, helped loot Russia in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Lobbyists in Washington, DC frantically signed up oligarch Russian clients starting in 1995. I know because one of those lobbyists hired me to work on the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

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One of the reasons people in Washington are pissed at Putin is that he cracked down on the kleptocrats, which ended some lucrative retainers for power players on K Street in DC. “The Guardian reported in 2008 that “‘oligarchs’ from the era of former president Boris Yeltsin have been purged by the Kremlin”.
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