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Future historians may well record
2016 a vintage year for Russian President Vladimir Putin. At any rate, at this point we can say it has been a good year for the Russian leader and his country's international standing. Even Western media, which did its best to discredit, even demonize, Putin have had to admit so, albeit begrudgingly. This week, the London
Financial Times described the Russian leader as "Buoyant Putin". While last week, the
Washington Post headlined: "Moscow has the world's attention. For Putin, that's a win".
The Washington Post surveyed
some of the key developments over the past year as being in Putin's favor, including a shaky European Union and the British Brexit vote to quit the bloc, an unwieldy NATO military alliance unsure of its purpose, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and the retaking of the strategic Syrian city of Aleppo.
The victory by the Syrian army in Aleppo, crucially aided by Russian military power, was surely a crowning achievement for Putin. When Putin ordered intervention in Syria at the end of 2015, it was predicted by US President Barack Obama that the move would result in a quagmire for Russia. A year later, Putin's decisive intervention has been vindicated as rolling back a jihadist campaign to destroy Syria.
Syrians celebrating the defeat of extremists in Aleppo have not only confounded earlier predictions;
the "liberation", as it is being feted by Syrians, serves to
expose Western governments and their media as having grossly distorted the war as some kind of popular uprising against a "tyrannical regime", rather than being what it is:
a foreign-backed criminal conspiracy for regime change deploying jihadi terror proxies.So the Russian-backed military campaign in
Syria is a clear winning event for Vladimir Putin. However, on the range of other world events outlined above, while they may be said to be in Putin's favor, it is more
a case of denial by Western leaders about their own failures, instead of attributing these setbacks to the alleged machinations of the Russian leader.
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