How Putin Squandered His Helsinki Triumph
Putin’s domestic opponents bet on rational, predictable outcomes—and they keep being undercut by reality.
by Andrei Soldatov
Jul 20, 2018
3 minutes
Hesitance mixed with fear—that’s the feeling the Trump-Putin meeting was met with by the liberal circles in Moscow, or what is left of them by now. The country has been hemorrhaging its best and brightest ever since Vladimir Putin returned triumphantly to the Kremlin in 2012.
Since then, the liberal middle classes have steadily lost influence in the face of powerful Kremlin propaganda. Democratic values and fighting corruption didn’t sound as appealing as the resurgence of the great Russian empire. The horrors of the Syrian
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