re: #123 ericblair

Putin doesn’t have an endgame. He’s an impulsive opportunist, who has an ecosystem around him that covers for his fuckups and generates ex post facto justifications for it. He’s got a declining economy, a pissed off population due to pension age fuckery, and a rickety military stuck in multiple dead-end semi-wars.

He and the rest of the Kremlin leadership fundamentally do not understand the West, which is dangerous. I’m pretty sure he was shocked that Obama allowed Trump to win and then actually take power, since that would never happen in Russia. He would have planned on a weakened Clinton presidency that grabbed power from the rightful winner, showing everyone that America was just as corrupt as Russia.

Yeah I might have overestimated his intelligence here.