...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
and his top minions to soon regret their decision to make a fool of President Donald Trump
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
At their Alaska summit, Putin gave Trump renewed hope for a peace deal on the Ukraine war — but that's now looking like Lucy setting up Charlie Brown for another football humiliation.
After initially signaling openness to a meet, Sergey Lavrov, Putin's foreign secretary, just dumped yet more cold water on any chance for a Putin sitdown with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky.
At their Alaska summit, Putin gave Trump renewed hope for a peace deal on the Ukraine war — but that's now looking like Lucy setting up Charlie Brown for another football humiliation.
Bloviating on NBC's ''Meet the Press,'' Lavrov announced, ''There is no meeting planned,'' and none will happen without advance agreement that fits Putin's ''presidential agenda.''
And that agenda is ''not ready at all'': Ukraine must publicly agree it will never join NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
, Zelensky must repeal laws that Lavrov claims ban ''the Russian language'' and concede in advance on ''territorial issues'' Lavrov wouldn't specify.
Oh, and he reiterated the Russians' believe that Zelensky isn't Ukraine's ''legitimate'' president, though ''we recognize him as the de facto head of the regime.''
This follows a full week of Lavrov & Co. insisting, for example, that no European troops can be deployed in Ukraine to secure the peace, and indeed demanding a veto over any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv.
The Russians are also pushing hard for Ukraine to agree in advance that it will cede the half of Donbas that Putin's been trying to conquer since 2014.
All of it clearly contradicts the gist of what Vice President JD Vance says Putin agreed to in Anchorage: ''They've recognized that they're not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv, and importantly, they've acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine,'' Vance said on the same NBC show.
Yes, Putin from the start of his invasion has claimed he means to oust a supposed ''neo-Nazi
...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both....'' regime in Kyiv (though Zelensky is Jewish!), and generally insists that Ukraine is really just a part of Russia that never should've been independent. So what?
If Vlad were genuinely willing to discuss a lasting peace deal, he'd have been willing to set those delusions aside, and to order Lavrov and his fellow toadies to quit it.