Four stunning recent events showed how the wheels are coming off the dictatorial regime of Vladimir Putin.
First, Putin was humiliated by being denied Germany’s annual Quadriga award after international pressure forced the Germans with publicly withdraw it.
Then, a new public opinion poll revealed that Putin is becoming just as unpopular at home as he is abroad.
Then it got much worse.
Next, Putin came in for extremely intense pressure from the United States. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Abkhazia and Ossetia, and the State Department implemented a ban on more than 60 Kremlin officials from entering the U.S. because of their complicity in the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky.
Finally, Putin was utterly humiliated by a brilliant bit of reporting from the Moscow Times, which showed that Putin’s efforts to discipline corrupt cops were entirely fraudulent, since the dismissed officers waltzed right back into cushy positions in the government.
The only question now is whether the craven people of Russia and the equally cowardly leaders of the NATO countries will somehow manage to find the courage to act in response to these developments, act in a meaningful way to directly challenge Putin’s authority. The notion that Putin is an unassailably popular and/or successful leader has been shattered, and the malignant consequences of his evil regime have been exposed. But so long as Puitn is allowed to act with impunity, with only superficial gestures like Quadriga and Magnitsky to obstruct him, Putin will continue to butcher his own people and undermine world security.
If the West needed any reminding of how horrifyingly evil Putin really is, that was delivered when Putin appeared before his answer to the Hitler-Jugend, Nashi, and declared that the United States was a nation of parasites and when it was revealed that Putin’s KGB henchmen had bombed the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. The world should have learned its lesson with the expansion of the USSR that it is not possible to wait when confronted with evil.
The world must act decisively against Putin today, or it will pay dearly for its failure tomorrow.
I think you are looking very much one sided on the topic in the above article. For example the 2008 conflict with Georgia was scrutinized by western media to incorrectly look at Russia as the aggressor.