James Holman: “Vladimir Putin has won so much these past three years that he may get tired of winning.”
“The U.S. intelligence community’s January 2017 report on Russian interference in the previous year’s presidential campaign sought to explain why Donald Trump was so attractive to Moscow. This sentence has fresh salience: ‘Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if Trump won, Russia would ‘drink champagne’ in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.'”
“Coming on the heels of Trump holding up assistance for Ukraine as his administration urged its new president to investigate a Democratic challenger, Trump’s order on Saturday to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria has given the Russians a new reason to reach for the bubbly.”
