Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[Dulfite]

KiigelHeart said:

Mandalore76 said:

Read it just fine, and specifically bolded the part that I was commenting to.  No need to "count on" someone else to be president when the first action which already happened emboldened the second action that is happening now.

But he could've counted on a less united and determined response from the west after his second action. That was my point. We can also say he would've preferred Trump to be the president to clear things up. Hiku already eleborated the reasons why.

Why would he have preferred Trump? If Putin was dumb, sure, but Putin isn't dumb. He knows, behind all the chaos and seemingly cluelessness of Trump, that there is an intelligence in there. Trump mastered the art of intentional misdirection to get under the skin of his opponents and draw out the worst in them.  Sometimes it backfired, but literally no one, not even his family, knew what he would do one day to the next. He kept his cards close to the chest.

Putin knew exactly what he was getting with Biden: a deep state controlled man seemingly in cognitive decline with a Vice President that is about as clueless as Dan Quayle.

With Trump he is either a genius or literally insane, and either way Putin was wise to avoid conflict with him. Fighting a genius is hard, fighting a madman is just idiotic.