Stop. Just fucking stop.

Stop writing any permutation of "VLADIMIR PUTIN OUTFOXES THE WEST AGAIN". I don't care if Putin burst into a third-grade special ed class and flaunted his ability to use the safety scissors with only minor injuries.

Stop.

Vladimir Putin is not a MASTER STRATEGIST and Learn-ed scholar of History, he's a pretentious thug whose genius insights are

1) If you just keep renting your fingers and smirking, everyone will think you have a cool plan, and

2) People don't want to start World War 3 over some tiny tract of land

That's it. He's a goddamn moron and one of the worst strategists in human history. All of the nonstop drama and the bullshit and the meddling that have defined his reign were totally preventable.

If Putin had just behaved like a normal person, made nice with the West, and sold the things beneath his feet, he could've effortlessly become one of the greatest leaders in Russian history. Very, very few rulers have ever been handed such a massive, easy victory.

But instead, Putin chose this convoluted James Bond villain fanfic, and the West bought into it, and for 20 years everyone felt this inexplicable urge to constantly call him a genius despite his country being a miserable authoritarian shithole everyone hated.

Then the war started, and for about five minutes Western media thought "heyyyyyy.....maybe this guy isn't that smart after all," due largely to 800,000 bad decisions in a row that I have neitjet the time nor the energy to rattle off here

But now, two years, 400,000 casualties, its economy perma-fucked, its reputation in tatters and half its armory wiped out, we are STILL regressing to "well maybe this was part of his 12-dimensional geopolitical chess after all, sorry for doubting you, Grandmaster".

Putin isn't going on Tucker Carlson as a show of strength. He's doing it because he knows that if just a few House Republicans flip--and the American MIC is not going to sit on its hands now, of all times--he will be totally out of options.

MASTER OUTFOXER WHO ALWAYS HAS US WHERE HE WANTS Vladimir Putin's genius plan is to let us punch him in the face until our hands get sore. This is literally Homer Simpson's boxing strategy. It is dumb and terrible.

He fears us, because he saw what happened to his equally untouchable pal Qaddafi.

But whenever someone writes about "Putin outsmarts ___", they are doing his bidding. Putin desperately needs to resurrect the "chess master" narrative. He needs to appear in control, and he needs to appear like a fearsome adversary capable of anything, and not what he actually is: a petty thug with delusions of grandeur who suddenly realized he's in way over his head.

You know, just like the Nazis he's saving us from.