I don’t think Putin will move against Ukraine without the go-ahead from his American accomplices. That’s right, I am really starting to suspect that the Fifth Column tail is wagging the Kremlin dog. Consider, for example, that the Republican Party collectively has a higher GDP than Russia itself. To begin with, they are connected to Russia at the hip through Big Oil. They can help Putin by weakening US resistance to Russian re-expansion and are sometimes painfully obvious in their ham fisted efforts to do so. In turn, the Repugs benefit from services the Kremlin can provide that they cannot provide for themselves, like massive troll farms and extra-legal espionage that is too risky for even the GOP. For its part, Russia ranks as a world power only because of the aging Soviet legacy of nuclear weapons, global intelligence, and influence capability. The ruling oligarchs appear all powerful mostly because they deliberately cultivate that image, but they are in fact rather run of the mill billionaires, vastly outnumbered, and out spent, by their western and Asian counterparts.