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Ron DeSantis assures Putin he'll be his willing stooge if elected [1]

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Date: 2023-02-22  

This was a week in which it seemed that Vladimir Putin couldn’t catch a break. On Monday President Biden delivered in Kyiv— as Eliot Cohen aptly puts it in The Atlantic -- a gut-punch directed at Putin’s aspirations, deftly using the symbolic backdrop of Ukraine’s capitol and most populous city to taunt the Russian dictator, while pledging America’s “unwavering and unflagging support” to Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” These sentiments were reiterated on Tuesday in another inspirational speech President Biden delivered in Warsaw, while Putin himself — that same day — was reduced to making veiled threats against his own citizens in a two-hour “state of the nation” diatribe before an unenthused audience of “bureaucrats, security officials and functionaries,” all of them robotically rising to clap again and again, before settling back into their seats and resuming their glum expressions.

Meanwhile, as reported by Josh Kovensky for Talking Points Memo, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former convict and head of Russia’s infamous, mercenary Wagner Group, published a graphic photo depicting mutilated Wagner corpses strewn all over a ditch while complaining about his lack of ammunition and accusing the Russian military leadership of “treason,” an unusual and revealing display of the infighting plaguing Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

The takeaway from this week, as described by The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, is that Putin is becoming more desperate.

Putin spent some two hours unloading a barrage of lies, grievances, and bizarre historical revisions in his attempt to justify the bloodletting he began a year ago. He also said Russia would suspend participation in a crucial nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States. What does this all mean? It means, more than anything, that Putin is desperate. He’s losing in Ukraine, where, according to a British estimate last week, roughly 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Even Russia’s tough-guy Wagner mercenaries are getting cut to pieces: The National Security Council official John Kirby said in a briefing Friday that the Wagner Group—many of them convicted criminals—has taken 30,000 casualties, which is about half the entire group’s strength and a huge number even for a contractor force.

So, Putin must have silently rejoiced upon hearing his own talking points regurgitated by Florida Gov. and soon-to-be-declared Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who implicitly assured him that despite these setbacks, it would only be a matter of time before U.S. policy in Ukraine would take an abrupt U-turn, allowing Putin to resume running roughshod over Ukraine, with a view towards threatening central and western Europe.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/22/2154282/-Ron-DeSantis-assures-Putin-he-ll-be-his-willing-stooge-if-elected

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