PUTIN’S PUPPET

Putin’s Ghouls Beg for Suck-Up Trump to Get Third Term

One by one, Moscow’s wish list items are being fulfilled.

Russia’s TV propagandists have been unable to hide their delight at President Donald Trump’s desperate appeasement of Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s shock order to allow Russian diesel imports and waive economic sanctions against Moscow, as well as disruptions to Ukraine’s Starlink-powered drone defense network and the president’s barrage of attacks on President Volodymyr Zelensky, have brought pure joy to the Kremlin’s favorite analysts and state media pundits.

Appearing on a state TV show The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov last Tuesday, political scientist Dmitry Kulikov asserted that Trump’s string of concessions to Putin amounted to an American defeat. “They’ve lost to the Russian Federation,” he proudly claimed.

On Sunday’s edition of the show, host Vladimir Solovyov said he hoped Trump would run for an unconstitutional third presidential term—and win.

Likewise, state TV pundits and experts repeatedly noted that Trump’s diesel deal—a desperate attempt to reduce soaring gas prices just before the midterms—demonstrates that Russia is “not indifferent” to the outcome of the elections.

As soon as the diesel deal was announced earlier this month, political scientist Sergey Mikheyev said the unusual arrangement derailed any notion that America is a country of morals and principles, which constitutes another important victory for Russia.

Appearing on a state TV show 60 Minutes, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee Alexey Zhuravlyov explained that he was very pleased with the outcome of negotiations with Trump’s emissaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, describing another round of ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine as the main result of the talks.

One by one, Moscow’s wish list items are being fulfilled. Putin, acting as Trump’s personal pied piper, is luring him into an illusory “peace deal,” tantamount to Ukraine’s and America’s capitulation. Russian experts predicted this turn of events last year, when they alleged that a deal was covertly reached by Trump and Putin in Anchorage, Alaska.

During Friday’s broadcast of the TV show One’s Own Truth, Michael Bohm, an American journalist who lives in Moscow, said that Russia was able to lure Trump by dangling lucrative deals in front of his nose. Bohm said, “He is salivating. This is why he is mercilessly attacking Zelensky.”

But there is trouble in the Kremlin’s paradise. Bipartisan resistance in the U.S. to an unwarranted rapprochement with Russia gives Putin’s propagandists a pause. Bohm noted, “Trump is losing control over his Republicans. The cult of Trump is falling apart, whereas they used to support him unconditionally.” He attributed this resistance to the fact that the U.S. president signed the sanctions bill championed by the late Senator Lindsey Graham and supported by most Republicans, but then “stabbed them in the back” by refusing to implement it and entering into the widely derided diesel deal.

The best solution to end U.S. support for Ukraine and Zelensky, according to Putin’s leading propagandists, is to make sure there is no Ukraine and no Zelensky. State TV shows are replete with suggestions for the U.S. government to file criminal charges against the president of Ukraine in the U.S. and have him kidnapped à la Nicolás Maduro or lured to America under the guise of a meeting.

Better yet, the Kremlin’s propagandists would love for Zelensky to be assassinated, but Moscow’s attempts have failed thus far, and now they’re hoping for help from America. State TV shows refer to the president of Ukraine as a walking corpse and a man who is already dead.

Russian pundits openly admit that they want to influence the Trump administration through their appearances on state television. During Friday’s broadcast of One’s Own Truth, former politician Sergey Stankevich outlined measures the U.S. Department of Justice should take to “delegitimize Zelensky.” He added, “Donald, your embassy will report this to you. Do it.”

Last week, Putin revived his old, tired trope that the Ukrainian land “is not their territory but the historical territory of Russia.” His propagandists, who for years promoted the notion that Ukraine should not exist, are echoing their leader. Appearing on the latest broadcast of Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, Margarita Simonyan, head of state-controlled TV network RT, claimed that Russia has been treating Ukraine so “tenderly,” because “this is our land.” She drew parallels between Chechnya and Ukraine and argued that the neighboring country should be vanquished like the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria by being absorbed by the Russian Federation. Then, Simonyan asserted, there would never be another Ukrainian president.

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Julia Davis

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