Prologue: Putina out-maneuvered the Oligarchs that helped re-elect Yeltsin, and once decreed Pres, started to take them off the board when convenient or when in

Prologue: Putina out-maneuvered the Oligarchs that helped re-elect Yeltsin, and once decreed Pres, started to take them off the board when convenient or when inconvenienced. #### Clearly not coincidence, probably not an accident, and aligns rather boringly with earlier KGB inspired, and FSB implemented, Putina tactics to remind Russians of FEAR™ and that he can be Strong for Them (see almost any "Chechen" terrorist attack). Putina (being the current Russian state) isn't going to personally profit from those pipelines short term, so use them as a weapon (all his other ones are evidently shite, or phantom spreadsheet entries). Now EU citizens can see Gas just pissing away in the sea AND at its transmission point (flaring) nightly on TV (TV has special power for him). While they stare directly into the face of a Ned Stark worthy Winter, cold, hungry and dumbfounded as tons of long reliable jobs are furloughed because its too expensive to make things on account of Energy decisions made decades ago. So, now an easily forgotten, mediocre KGB operative, dulled by Dresden and steeled by the hard realities of life in Leningrad (changed back to Saint Petersburg by the time he skulked back from Dresden) put all his chips on the table, didn't know they were counterfeit, and now is doing whatever he can to change the outcome. Just like a former KGB flame-out with heavy gangster influence would. I can't see a path of sane negotiation or de-escalation here while he's in play. Any weakening of EU/NATO stance is going to allow cash infusion that quiets Oligarchs (any left alive) and everyone else in the gov't line of embezzlement, while emboldening Putina. The most tragic (and thusly, Russian) aspect is that he's trying to channel Stalin (in a positive way?) and be that Man of Steel - even using Nazi's as a prop - and just becoming the very boogie man he heard in every story as a wee lad from a nation of people traumatized by the deaths of TWENTY MILLON Soviet citizens. This of course follows not only after, but because of, the un-hinged purging they both initiated on their own, for completely and yet complimentary, paranoid delusions.