JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin Seeks Revenge on a World Order He Once Wanted to Join” – Bloomberg
“The KGB agent turned warlord president has shaped Russia with resentment and force. As Donald Trump threatens to abandon NATO allies if he returns to the White House, Putin’s poised to take advantage.”
“… Putin is attempting to strike his own decisive blow against the U.S. and Europe to reshape [the] global order to Russia’s advantage … backed by military force and grudges … [gambling] that he can bend the world to his will. China … is watching carefully . … [Putin] was the KGB agent who came out of the shadows … after the turmoil of the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin; … [Putin] dismantled the oligarchy that morphed out of communism and became its all-powerful ruler; … now [Putin is] trying to ensure his … Ukraine [invasion] doesn’t turn into an Afghanistan-like failure …. 71, Putin is on course for a fifth term … as hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded in the war …. Putin … is reshaping Russian society … at an unprecedented pace … stok[ing] patriotic fervor with a mix of nostalgia for Russia’s imperial and Soviet past in parallel with the harshest repression for decades. … While his invasion of Ukraine triggered Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II, the scale of the rupture between Russia and the West in the past two years still seems hard … to conceive. …”