Agreed, but I don't think he knows what he believes in.
A supposed antiwar Buddhist who is in love with a brutal ex-KGB agent with a long track record of murder, brutality, and oppression.
Vladimir Putin, war criminal
The Russian leader has a long record of inhumanity.
When Putin came to power in 1999, he almost certainly approved, and perhaps even orchestrated, the bombings of two apartment buildings in Moscow, in which hundreds of innocent Russians lost their lives. As Amy Knight, a specialist on the KGB, argues, the evidence makes it “abundantly clear” that the Russian security service, the FSB (which succeeded the KGB), was “responsible for carrying out the attacks.” Concludes Knight: It is “inconceivable” that the bombings would have been done “without the sanction of Putin,” who exploited the panic they created to crack down on the Chechens and present himself as an indispensable leader.
Putin used the bombings to reignite the Second Chechen War, in which he launched a massive air and land campaign that produced thousands of refugees, reduced much of the Chechen capital Grozny to rubble and killed at least 25,000 civilians.
Putin has funded, promoted, supplied and aided and abetted the Russian and pro-Russian terrorists in eastern Ukraine. Thus far, that war has taken 10,000 lives. It was Putin’s proxies who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, killing 298 innocent people aboard.
Russia’s ruthless bombing of Syria’s civilian population and targets has been termed criminal by various Western leaders and human rights organizations, prompting U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to ask her Russian counterpart: “Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child, that gets under your skin? That just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?”
During Putin’s years in office, a series of Russian democrats, journalists and opposition leaders have been killed in mysterious circumstances — the most prominent being Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, Sergei Magnitsky, Natalia Estemirova, Sergei Yushenkov, Paul Klebnikov, Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova.
The record speaks for itself: Putin is a killer and war criminal — no different in the breadth and depth of his criminality than the Serbian war criminal, Slobodan Milošević. He must be treated as such by world leaders with even a minimal commitment to human rights and basic decency.
... policymakers should avoid doing anything that aids and abets Putin’s criminal proclivities.
Sanctions must not only be maintained, they should be intensified — not because they will change Putin’s barbaric behavior, but because the West and the world must demonstrate they oppose barbarism.
One day, Putin will be gone, and Russia’s democratic opposition will be able to make their country a decent, law-abiding state. In the meantime, Putin must be told in no uncertain terms that the world will not tolerate any more imperialist land grabs and wars.
http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-criminal-inhumanity-syria/
Antiwar Buddhist .. doubt it.
