Sad Vlad Putin Gets No Respect

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I had the rare opportunity and privilege of visiting Russia with a group of social work students and educators in the spring of 1999.  We spent seven or eight days touring various sights involved with social work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then two nights in Stockholm, Sweden.  I had a medical emergency while our group was in Russia, and, as a result, also got to ride in an ambulance across Moscow one night, visit a Russian hospital, and literally hitchhike across Moscow in order to get back to our hotel very late that night.  (Not as scary as it sounds because a Russian-speaking tour guide was with me.)

There were citizen protests occurring in the streets while we were in Moscow, but our buses were generally diverted around those.  The old Soviet Union had officially collapsed in the winter of 1991, and s successor, the Russian Federation, was established in its place as the political home to the old country of Russia and many of its territories (subjects).  Boris Yeltsin was the original leader (President) of the Russian Federation, and he was still in charge when I was there in May of 1999.  The following year, in 2000, Vladimir Putin, the former head of the Soviet Union's spy agency, the KGB, was elected President of the Russian Federation, and, with the exception of one four-year-period where he was constitutionally forced to step down to the role of Prime Minister - and continued to run things anyway,  Putin has held that position to this day.

But Putin has harbored this crazy idea of eventually getting the band back together (reforming the old Soviet Union), and he seems to have crafted a long-range foreign policy with that goal as its focus.  In 2014 he used his Russian forces to annex Crimea, a large section of Ukraine whose population had strong family and cultural ties to Russia, and last year, of course, he began a military invasion of Ukraine.  

Since that invasion, however, the political worm has turned against Russia, and Putin has found himself in the crosshairs of unfavorable world opinion.  As a result of reports that Ukrainian children have been forcibly removed to Russia by  Russian forces, Vladimir Putin  became the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the World Court in The Hague, something which could result in his physical arrest, though that is an unlikely eventuality.  There have also been reports of a series of palace intrigues in which various military leaders and oligarchs have been rumored to be plotting for Vlad's removal from office.

Then the night before last things got even more dangerous for the Russian leader when a pair of drones reportedly flew across the city of Moscow and blew up over the Kremlin (the home of the Russian government), causing only minor damage to the structure.  Russian officials immediately claimed that the drones had been launched by Ukrainians in retaliation for the Russian invasion of their country, though the evidence for that assertion remains unclear.  Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodmyr Zelensky quickly denied the Russian claim, and said that his country is focused on defensive fighting at home, and that Ukraine is not engaged in warfare beyond its borders.

The drones could be the result of some other plot to remove Putin (whose residence is in the Kremlin) from power, or it could have just been a Russian government stunt to be seen as justification for eventually  trying to take out Zelensky.

But regardless of the motive for the attack, if indeed it was an attack, it still adds to the overall image of Vlad Putin being less of a feared autocrat than were his successors who headed the old Soviet Union.  Much like the late American comedian, Rodney Dangerfield, Putin is a man who basically gets no respect.  

That's not a good look for a world leader, Vlad.  Try to avoid going near any open windows in high-rise buildings!