Not much about Vladimir Putin’s recent behavior has been wholly surprising. Repressive, compulsively controlling autocrats don’t usually stop amassing power and quashing dissent and individual rights on their own volition. Though Putin’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime has lost him the benefit of the doubt of many in the West, that is more a result of the self-delusion of Westerners than any sudden dark turn by the man whose political nemeses have ended up dead, exiled, or in Siberian prisons for a decade.
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