Evil Genius

Sometimes, evil geniuses can be impressive. Very impressive. Like Lord Voldemort. A great (albeit evil) wizard, the man wasn’t just brute force. He could manipulate others into doing his work, he could improvise, he could use guile and cunning…And now I found a real life guy for that role: Vladimir Putin.

For starters, just see why the man is even Russia’s President today. The Russian constitution (yes, they have one) says nobody can be President for more than 2 successive terms. Putin realized the keyword there was “successive”: so he served 2 successive terms, then made Medvedev his proxy for the next term, and now is back in power! How’s that for exploiting a loophole?

And just see how Putin has handled the Ukraine/Crimean crisis. The EU had been wooing an in-dire-economic-straits Ukraine for some time to come into their orbit. Just when it looked Ukraine would say Yes (and Russia would lose access to the Crimean naval bases), Putin got the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, to back off. A revolution followed, Yanukovych was overthrown and Ukraine seemed to be slipping away. And that is when Putin moved in with his military might. Suddenly, the EU found they had bought a knife to a gun fight!

Next, Putin says that the fact that the elected President of Ukraine was ousted (whatever “elected” means in Ukraine) makes the current government illegitimate. That justifies his acts within Russia, and allows the nations that don’t want to get dragged into a pissing contest between the West and Russia a way out: who is really right here, they ask? And go on to abstain from UN votes on the issue!

Further, Putin is making it clear that he only wanted Crimea…for now. But by keeping the rest of Ukraine on boil both by inciting riots and via economic means (“Moscow has jacked up the price it charges Ukraine twice in recent days by a total of more than 80 percent”, says Foreign Policy); he can use the threat (real or imagined) to Russian ethnicity citizens in Ukraine to move in later.

Recently, Putin got Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who exposed America’s surveillance of call records and Internet traffic, to ask him on TV whether Moscow does the same to its citizens? Putin’s answer:

“We don’t have a mass system for such interception and according to our law it cannot exist...Russia does not have as much money to spend on this as they do in the States.”

We Russians are too poor, too technologically backward, he said. And turned that into a positive thing!

That’s check and mate for the Russian grandmaster.