From that dust these muds

Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister in August 1999 after then President Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the post, and within a meteoric four months he was already occupying the Russian Presidency on an interim basis, following Yeltsin's untimely resignation.  

Since then, to date, the global village has only gotten worse. And now he will stay on for six more years, until 2030, and the Constitution itself allows him another term until 2036.

He will be 73 this year and it makes my skin crawl to think that he could reach 85 years in control of Russia's destiny; Stalinism lasted from 1924 to 1953 until death removed Iosif Stalin from power after twenty-nine years of dictatorship.  

Putin will celebrate his silver jubilee this year and, if he makes it to 2030 alive, he will have ruled longer than Stalin, let alone Tsar Nicholas II who lasted 23 years as emperor.

We cannot be happy that a dictator so menacing, so self-deified and so capable of eliminating his enemies right under our noses is still at the helm of Russia.  

For Europeans, it is a nightmare in martial times when no one hides, or disguises, that we are involved in a war any more; our smiles will fade when they start calling up young people for military service, because military service will become compulsory again, as they are already studying it in Germany and other countries.  

The question is how, at this point, none of the rulers of the great little global village saw the wolf in sheep's clothing and let it run wild and, worse still, allowed it to invade Crimea. And the United States and the European Union (EU) stood idly by in 2014, only responding with indignation through tepid sanctions and freezing Russia out of the G7.

Then US President Barack Obama is partly responsible for the current mess with Ukraine and for the fact that Europeans are spending more and more of their budget not on education, but on buying weapons, producing more ammunition and equipping their respective armies. 

Ukraine should never have been left alone. European selfishness took a back seat and simply said: "This is Ukraine's problem". And because Obama carried the weight of the Nobel Peace Prize behind him, he chose to ignore Putin and ignore the plight of the Ukrainians. 

Ten years later, Ukrainians are dying to defend their sovereignty and their existence as a nation; and they are doing so to try to liberate the territories occupied by the Russian army.  

If Ukraine had been supported in 2014 this would not be happening. Putin, who is a former KGB agent and later served as head of the Federal Security Service (FSS) and secretary of the Security Council, knows the profiles and personalities of his opponents well. He is skilful and calculating.  

Throughout his years in power he has been accumulating decisions, gauging the response of the US and its allies to his strategic moves.  

Moreover, he has gone from being a politician with a clear ambition to reposition Russia as a counterweight to US power (he lost it after the break-up of the USSR in 1991 and the end of the Cold War) to positioning himself as the totem of a new empire. 

He is the kind of politician who has his enemies investigated; who blackmails with compromising information and with revealing confidential information; he is the kind of politician who takes revenge and has no scruples.  

The image of Putin comes to mind, last Sunday, surrounded by millennials and young people of generation Z; the new tsar chanted his triumph in the middle of a "fake" election while the selected young people applauded like robots, without gesticulating, without blinking an eye... without smiling. They are overwhelmingly afraid of him, they were born and Putin was already in power; it cannot be that the damned dialectic brings us cycles in history in which an imperialist satrap destroys the future, not only of his governed, but also of other countries.