Putin’s Court Jester

Russian Lawmaker Who Predicted Ukraine Invasion Dies

Leader of Soviet Union’s first official opposition party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky made a career stoking ultra-nationalist outrage.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the outrageous ultra-nationalist showman of Russian politics, has died aged 75. His death was confirmed by officials in the State Duma, where he served for more than three decades as the head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LPDR). The Moscow Times said Zhirinovsky had been “gravely ill for weeks after contracting Covid-19, despite claiming to have received eight vaccine doses.” Born in Kazakhstan to a Jewish father, who abandoned him at a young age to move to Israel, and a Russian mother, Zhirinovsky became a rabid Russian nationalist known for his fierce anti-Western rhetoric and fistfights in parliament. He helped found the LDPR in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the country’s first legal opposition party, and led it for the next three decades. The newspaper noted that on one of his last public appearances, last December, Zhirinovsky almost exactly predicted the timing of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.