[...] the evidence is compelling that Putin's record was murderous from the get-go. What I suspect happened is that the Blair government didn't want … - John Sweeney

The results of Ceausescu's exercise in social engineering could be seen immediately after the revolution throughout the country in orphanages and hospital wards where the unwanted babies lay. The unwanted included the babies suffering from AIDS – though the regime did not recognise that Romania had an AIDS problem. This official blindness made the problem worse, disastrously so. An old medical habit – abandoned in the West long before the Second World War – had lingered in Romania. It was to inject newborn babies with blood to give them greater strength. One batch of blood contaminated with AIDS, probably in a rare aid package from the United States, was the root cause. The lack of fresh, clean needles for the injections led, through cross-infection, to an AIDS epidemic among the young. But as this too officially did not happen, nothing was done about it.

An election where one of the candidates has total control over who the other candidates are is not an election but a coronation. With Yavlinsky out of the way and Navalny not well known enough to run, Putin's hand-picked opponents were Gennady Zyuganov, an elderly Commie, trusted to rock the boat of his geriatric supporters and that alone, Mikhail Prokhorov, a giraffe-like oligarch, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, the fool's bladder on a fascist stick, and Sergey Mironov, a nonentity with the flavour of the actor who gets killed in the first five minutes of a movie.

What's so pathetic about Putin's world view is that anything that makes him look weak can only be the work of the CIA. The possibility that Russian citizens working with free-spirited Western journalists and a Bulgarian Sherlock Holmes could get the better of him and his goons is not allowed.