Putin's Immortality Explains His Dominance Across the World Stage

In a Star Trek episode, the Enterprise discover a powerful alien who possesses an unknown painting by Leonardo da Vinci and an unknown work of music by Johannes Brahms. Kirk and Spock confront him and the man admits that, yes, he is both da Vinci and Brahms. He is in fact immortal and omni-powerful.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the move. His special forces units are preparing for another invasion of eastern Ukraine. In a recent piece in the Washington post, Charles Krauthammer ponders how this former KGB chief has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East from the US-Egypt alliance to the new alliance between Iran and Russia. He is dictating to the US and NATO, the future of Syria. So impressed are they with Putin, that Iran's mullahs for the first time are allowing Russian bombers to use bases in Iran. The first foreign troops on Iranian soil and 50 years. Krauthammer writes:

This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran's intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now.

The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That's what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That's what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria.

Charles Krauthammer, The Price of Powerlessness, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-price-of-powerlessness/2016/08/18/f61d2c34-6575-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html?utm_term=.6f6e67364bf7

Meanwhile half the Russian navy ships are unable to get underway. A holdover from Soviet days is that Russian naval crews report to their stations, take home a paycheck, and never even report whether or not their ships have working engines. The Russian Navy does have a few good units; but Russia's one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsova had to be towed into port recently. The oil based Russian economy is floundering to the point where Putin has to arrest formerly allied oligarchs, in order to shake them down for cash.

How is all of this possible?

The obvious explanation is the Putin is some sort of powerful being, such as Vlad the Impaler a.k.a. Dracula. Or that the Russians have discovered the secret to time travel. Photos are circulating though the blogosphere, showing Putin as a soldier in 1920, in 1941, and again today.

So is Putin an all powerful being who has mastered time travel, or an immortal being who has learned secrets only a thousand years of life could reveal? Neither, probably. But he may have risen to power by faking an act of Chechen terrorism, to secure his own election in 1999. The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror that Brought Putin to Power, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible?utm_source=NR&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=August17satter

David Satter, the only Journalist not killed for investigating the bombing incident, writes: All available evidence points to Putin's complicity in the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Russia. Those who have tried to investigate have been killed off, one by one.

I believe that Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror committed against his own people. The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag.

So why is it that the average Russian doesn't care? Why is it that about 65% of the Russian electorate approves of Putin, and has elected him leader to four terms over 16 years? Again, Krauthammer explains:

Consider what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very weak hand - a rump Russian state, shorn of empire and saddled with a backward economy and a rusting military - he has restored Russia to great-power status. Reduced to irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.

In Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn the map. His annexation of Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager to throw off the few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape of eastern Ukraine continues.

Putin doesn't see US Interests as necessarily in contrast to America's. Abandon NATO as a relic of the past, he suggests to American friends such as Donald Trump. Russian interests, Putin probably suggests to Trump, are compatible with America's true legitimate national goals. Chinese interests are also not incompatible with American and Russian interests, because they lie in dominating South Asia and the South China Sea. Together with China and Russia, the U.S. can dominate the worlds smaller countries, including those in the Americas, Europe and Asia, throughout the 21st Century. He need not be a time traveller or immortal to see the world in this way, because the Russians have seen it thusly since Lenin.

"At last, Russia has returned to the world arena as a strong state – a country that others heed and that can stand up for itself."--Vladimir Putin, 2008

In a way, Putin really is immortal. His political ideals come directly from the the very first political scientist. Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince in 1513, approved of the leader of a state to lie, cheat, steal and kill, as long as he did it to further the national interest. No wonder Putin appears in Jan van Eyk's paintings from that same time period. Perhaps Vlad and Nikko hung out together, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli