An interview with Russia’s leader and congressional resistance to aid for Ukraine underscore the transformation of the parties and electorate in the United States more than three decades after the Cold War.

The idea was to isolate him, to make him a pariah, to put him in a box as punishment for brazen violations of international law. They kicked him out of their world leaders’ clubhouse, cut off his country’s economy, even issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes.

But Vladimir V. Putin does not look all that isolated these days. Mr. Putin, the Russian president with czar envy who invaded neighboring Ukraine without provocation, killing or injuring hundreds of thousands, is having something of a moment in the United States.

With the help of a populist former Fox News star and America’s richest man, Mr. Putin has gained a platform to justify his actions even as Russian and American journalists languish in his prisons. His favored candidate is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination while Congress weighs abandoning Ukraine to the tender mercies of Russian invaders.

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  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    9·
    10 months ago

    This is one hell of a soft-pedal article.

    While Robert S. Mueller’s investigators in 2019 found no criminal conspiracy between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin’s Russia during the 2016 campaign

    That factual issue aside, they attempt to cover the affinity the Republicans have developed for Putin with absolutely no mention of the river of money flowing from Russia to the GOP, and only a little hint of the space-program-priority disinformation campaign that accompanies it. There’s stuff like:

    the former president’s enigmatic affinity for the Russian ruler remains pronounced and, to many, still baffling.

    Mr. Putin has made himself into something of a like-minded ally of certain right-wing forces in the United States

    A Republican Party that once defined itself through muscular resistance to Russia has turned increasingly toward a form of neo-isolationism with, in some quarters, strains of sympathy for Moscow.

    There’s this elaborate pretense that the GOP’s shift towards Russia is a reasoned decision they made (combined with feigned confusion over why), when in reality it’s just the whore’s enthusiasm towards whoever’s currently punching her ticket.