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| Putin will soon be in trouble |
Vladimir Putin has claimed "victory" in the presidential election. But he will soon be in trouble:
His greed means public revenues that should have gone to ease life in the former Soviet Union have actually gone to line his pockets — and that of his former KGB (now FSB) cronies. The road system remains farcical, but Putin has a palace in the south of France; the price of oil has shot up, but the Russian people can't educate their children properly; and so forth. Suddenly, Russian voters feel they've been taken for a ride — and, in a remarkable episode last November, they booed their PM when he appeared at a wrestling match: it had never happened to him before, and if you look at this video, you can see how shocked he was by the hostility. Worse was to follow: in a wintry version of the Arab Spring, Russians started pouring into the streets and the squares, clamouring for his removal.
Putin may well wish to please them and go: why stay in cold, hostile, run-down Russia when he could bask in the sunny welcome that the west (especially the UK) regales Russian oligarchs with? But unfortunately the man who spun the cleverest of red webs has been caught in his own deceptions. Putin 's rise to power is down to a Mafia of spies; his continued success is guarded by thugs. Too many sinister figures have a vested interest in his being at the helm; if he lets them down, he's history.
So Putin goes through the motions of an election like today's. And he makes a fuss about foiled assassination attempts like the one "foiled" by his security police last week. But in the end, Putin will be caught in a messy plot: the opposition wants him out, and the men who put him at the top want him silent. Not an easy place to be.
Read the entire Telegraph article by Cristina Odone here
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