End of regime in Russia: an opportunity to clean out the stables

With his own hands, in his speech and Q&A session last Thursday at the Valdai Discussion Club annual gathering in Sochi, Vladimir Putin has done great damage to Russia’s national security by his pandering to the ego of Donald Trump and cancellation of the red lines he publicly set down one year ago with respect to the prospect of long-range American missiles being supplied to Kiev. He is undecided and indecisive, which is fatal when we speak of deterrence. This indecision was further evident today in the excerpt from the “Moscow, Kremlin, Putin” show on Dmitry Kiselyov’s ‘News of the Week’ broadcast of Russian state television. Journalist Pavel Zarubin caught Putin as he left the stage at the end of the Valdai Q&A to ask him for further clarification of his position on the Tomahawks. Putin first said that the delivery of the Tomahawks by the Trump administration “would destroy” Russian-American relations, then caught himself and restated it as “would do serious damage” to those relations. [by the way, Tass has just put on their ‘ticker tape’ the version that the deployment ‘would destroy’ relations].