I write when not a single ballot has entered the polls. And despite this, I am sure I am not wrong. The winner of the elections in Russia is Vladimir Putin! I have not consulted with the Pitoniso Pito or with the Witch Lola. I didn’t need it. The pantomime organized to perpetuate himself in power this time has surpassed the most twisted imagination. In the schools there were alternative candidates to Putin, but they are puppets of the regime designed to smear the pout with pseudo-democracy. The one who responded to them, the liberal Boris Nadezhdin, was neutralized by the electoral commission, and the popular Alexei Navalny was murdered in an Arctic prison. Incidentally, all the independent structures that advocated boycotting the elections, NGOs, foundations, activists or dissidents have been branded as foreign agents, which entails ostracism or prison.
Everything is in order for Putin to renew his absolutist presidency for six years and continue with the “special military operation”, the euphemism under which the invasion of Ukraine is hidden. The drama is that the Kremlin tsar had no other option. He needs the power to save his neck. No one like him knows that leaving the handle is his sentence and that is why he will prolong the agony until at least 2036, as the law that he himself reformed allows him to do. If pressure required it, at most he would consider appointing a pussy-licker willing to stand up for the president, because Putin doesn’t trust even his shadow. The trail of enemies is so long that any show of weakness can trigger his downfall.
The alley through which he travels has no turning back. Forward and without pause, a new twist to international tension, populism in spades and repressive autocracy. The concoction that nourishes Russian politics and silences disagreements coincides with the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO. But the toast, with soda, because the lies and Western arrogance that accompanied the expansion of the pact to the East woke up the hibernated bear and many of today’s evils were born in that yesterday.
