An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying tsar, Vladimir Putin turns 70 tomorrow while his brutal war against Ukraine is exploding in his puffy, currants-in-dough, steroid-addled face.
Cargo 200s – Soviet slang for soldier corpses – are piling up; surviving troops are voting with their feet; draftees are running for the border; their mothers and wives are protesting in the streets.
How could the man who, on February 23, stood proud as the ruler of the world’s biggest country, armed with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, owning treasure in oil and gas, whose trophies include such Cold War Two victories as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, have messed everything up so badly?
