Who knew that Putin would turn out to be a long-lost member of the Borgia family?
ETA: We should start referring to him as Lucrezia Putin.
Putin has taken KGB tactics out of the shadows and into broad daylight, because there’s no plausible deniability here. The motive is clear as are the means and the methods. This can’t be good for a secretive spy agency to be exposed like this…repeatedly. Regardless, Putin is a thug, and perhaps a madman, that the world community needs to stop.
Is he doing this in response to the Manafort deal, or for internal reasons?
My thought is that he’s doing this as a message to people outside russia, because people inside russia he can simply have shot.
Fingers crossed.
I think Putin has a scrap book on ways to deal with “meddling kids.” There is poison and internment. Then there is the insidious slow creep of interference in public norms, values, and institutions to be used against political bodies as opposed to individual’s bodies.
They killed Mikhail Lesin, once a Putin adviser, with a baseball bat in a Washington hotel room the night before he was going to speak to the DOJ. The message is simple–if you oppose or represent a threat to the regime you’re not safe anywhere in the world.
You cannot look at this without considering the Novichok poisonings.
Putin’s message is if you piss him off, running off to Europe or the UK will not keep you safe.
Question, conservatives and Republicans who believe Russia is the answer: what’s to stop Putin from poisoning you or your family?
Your loyalty to Putin? The American military positioned in a freaking desert? The FBI, which Trump claims to probably on their side? Seriously, what’s to stop this from coming to America, besides pledging allegiance to the Russian mob?
Part of me wants to say something humorous, but I think Putin is very much a dire threat to the world, and that is not be made light of. And the person who has been poisoned deserves serious attention to his plight. I hope that he and his doctors and nurses are up to the challenge. Every survival, and there are too few of those, essentially gives Putin the finger.
To some extent, if it were not obvious it would not be effective. That is the balancing act of this sort of thing. The perpetrator wants the message to be clear, but not clearly be the perpetrator for purposes of response. (And it is probably why poison seems to be the first choice of the weak and the cowardly.)
It’s just slightly more subtle than Putin publicly saying: “Yeah, so what ya gonna do about it?”
I’m not saying that Putin isn’t behind the poisonings, but, why the heck aren’t they using more effective poisons? Do these particular poisons not kill you right away? Is that the point–make what’s left of your life “unbearable?”
Also, curious that Verzilov was allowed to be moved out of Russia, if the point was to kill him, no?
I don’t have answers or a theory, just questions…
Interesting questions, but I expect the answer is that not everything is choreographed. Even dictators can’t always be proactive.
But the the post election murder of Russian diplomats in NYC, and these poisonings are undoubtably a tear guard action and a warning flare to Manafort, Trump, Flynn, et al.
Putin is saying, “there is nothing that your weak cowardly incompetent Donald Trump will do to protect you or punish us for killing.”
Manafort’s plea is a delaying tactic. Designed to put off a trial until after midterms when DJT can issue a pardon. I’m not sure manafort cares about his children, but he knows he will be poisoned if he actually provides useful information to Muller.
too late = he already has told Mueller a lot of stuff. He had to make a proffer to get the deal.