Czar Putin

Vladimir Putin isn't quite of the ilk of Vlad the Impaler; he is far, far more subtle, as suits a 21st-Century ruler of a great nation with an imperial past, both under the czars and under Communism. Russians do like their leaders to be strong men of action, remote and feared. Their indomitable will must be done, and those who dare oppose their rule become familiar with the dread consequences.

For journalists anxious to uncover news stories of government-sponsored activities that may shock and dismay other nationals, the penalties can be dire, but they are also effective in dissuading many whose ambition is to oppose corruption, nepotism, tyranny and oppression, to obey the cautionary impulse of self-preservation. Leaders of opposition parties who flagrantly disobey orders to refrain from public accusations and protests languish in the obscurity of prison.

There is never any shortage of charges reflecting putative ill deeds, all of them revolving somehow around betrayal of the state through treasonous activities, and by extension the people of Russia, to enable state prosecutors to manoeuvre such irritating people into cooling their revolutionary ardour in jail cells. The consequences certain can be "tough punishment" as Mr. Putin himself remarked of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's ten years in prison.

Immense wealth sometimes is no counterweight to immense power. And since both were attained through questionable means there is a counterbalance in their moral equivalency, but none quite in the capacity of the power of the state to squelch the power of the dollar to buy change in governance. A background in the brutal byways of the secret service trumps a background in manipulating a financial bonanza, no question.

It's doubtful that President Yeltsin was fully aware of the calibre of the man he helped attain to the presidency after him, but his replacement, while of modest physical stature, comes complete with a robust self-assurance and a wily ambition to honour Josef Stalin by emulating him in certain ways. He is ruthless, with a keen insight into the psychology of human nature, a more capable poker player than a Nobel Peace Laureate; able to manoeuvre Barak Obama into a peace corner by a leader himself enabling war.

On the other hand, President Putin can always insist that a statesman who wants peace prepares for war, borrowing from the 4th Century AD Roman military expert, Flavius Vegetius Renatus who wrote the most influential military treatise in the Western world. Mr. Putin dislikes surprises just as much as he detests opposition. And he has turned his attention slightly away from the Winter Olympics in Sochi to usher new war-preventatives into the country's updated military doctrine.

It's difficult to quite interpret who inspires whom; whether Russia, reflecting on its client-state and  the Syrian regime's response to its own opposition has loosened all restraints against state-sponsored brutality directed against its own population to dampen a revolution, by itself effectively coercing the population efficiently enough to nip all nascent revolutions in the bud. 'National security' absolutely trumps what the mealy-mouthed West calls 'human rights'.

The Kremlin's latest announcement meant to instill caution tinged with apprehension in the minds of critics that it is prepared under its march toward self-preservation facing off against the malign intentions of the NATO-US missile shield plan to threaten Russian sovereignty in East Europe, to thoroughly subscribe to the newly-declared doctrine of 'first strike'. The use of a nuclear 'deterrent' should Moscow be of the firm opinion that even a conventional mass strike against the country or its allies is imminent.

And now that Russia has foxily led the United States and the other members of the UN Security Council along with Germany into the improbable fiction of a peaceful Iran wishing to acquire an additional energy source to power its civil infrastructure, surely those anti-ballistic missile silos erected too close to Russia's borders for comfort, but aimed, the U.S. declared repeatedly at any potential threats from Iran, should be removed?

Doubters, beware.