We are so engrossed in this column keeping an eye out for the human monstrosities that run our own country that we sometimes forget to widen the net.

For example, you will have noticed – some of you, I am sure, with great joy – the relative absence of US politics on this page since the Orange Sex Pest was defeated in the US presidential election in last november.

Not that all is well there. Far from there. Most Republicans are now trying to block an investigation into the events of January 6 this year, when Trump unleashed his mob on Capitol Hill in Washington. They do say, “They were peaceful protesters. Nothing to see here. “

Even though there are hundreds of hours of CCTV evidence showing these “peaceful protesters” building gallows, brandishing nooses, chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE” and beating police officers.

“How can Republicans have a neck of pure brass to do this, John?”

Well, I’m glad you asked me that question. Because that brings us to this other guy that we just don’t watch over enough, the guy who did blatant lies, ‘whataboutism’ and disinformation in global art forms, the guy who made Trump and Johnson look like the absolute lightweights they are, the world’s most evil leader: Vladimir Putin.

Putin, as you probably haven’t noticed, has been doing a lot of it lately.

In January, the fierce Putin critic and opposition politician Alexei Navalny was arrested on his return from Germany to Russia, where he had been treated for poisoning with novichok – the favorite lethal drug of the Russian secret service.

Novichok, you will recall, was the same chemical weapon that nearly killed former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018.

It’s still unclear why Putin’s henchmen favor him – it always seems to leave everyone alive, talking, and really angry.

When he was admitted to hospital in Russia, the team of doctors who examined Navalny made a more bizarre diagnosis than novichok.

They said her illness may have been due to “a rare metabolic disease resulting in hypoglycemia.”

Uh. Yes. Right. Sure.

Then Sergei Maksimishan, a doctor at the hospital who produced this strange diagnosis, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 55.

Then Rustam Agishev, the head of trauma at the same hospital, also died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 63.

Weird, isn’t it? It got stranger. Two weeks ago, Alexander Murakhovsky, the former chief doctor of the same hospital, mysteriously disappeared on a hunting trip. Putin’s critics feared the worst. But, three days later, Murakhovsky was found alive, wandering out of a Siberian forest.

What did he have to say about this strange episode? “Everything is normal,” he says, normally as you do. “I feel good. I will keep to myself how I survived.

I bet you will, mate. Especially if you want to continue to survive, rather than end up like so many others who fall victim to Putin: accidentally slipping on a bar of soap before falling with a “rare metabolic disease” that mysteriously causes a bullet to be shot in your body. brain at close range.

Meanwhile, exactly as all of this was happening, Putin was signing a bill that will allow him to run for the Russian presidency two more times.

Officially, the new law limits Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime, so it will prohibit exactly the kind of intermixing between the presidency and the role of prime minister that Putin himself held earlier in his career.

But specifically, it doesn’t count terms served before it went into effect, meaning that, for technical reasons, all of Putin’s last four terms – and his current one – don’t count.

Convenient, eh? Because that means this bastard lying, cheating, and murderous bastard will potentially be in office until 2036, when he turns 80.

Putin first became president in 2000. If he hangs on until 2036, his tenure will have surpassed that of another lovable old thug, Joseph Stalin, who only managed 29 years in first place , making Putin the longest-serving Russian leader since the days of the Czars.

One can only hope that somehow it will end as badly for Putin as it does for the Czars.

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