All concerned deny any wrongdoing. - John Sweeney

Paranoia is destroying the Russian Army from within. Vladimir Putin is a prisoner in his own high castle, just like Stalin. His terror of revealing his hand too early, and it being leaked to the Americans, was so great that he kept back his true invasion plans for and from the army until the day before the invasion. So the Russian general staff have had to make up the war as they go along – and the result has been disastrous. Generals have been appointed on the basis of their fealty to the Kremlin, not their courage, not their competence.

For most of its history Romania has been divided, skewered and kebabed by a succession of foreign invaders and masters, some of whom were unspeakably nasty. Cruel as Ceausescu's time was, it was not without precedent in his country's history.

A word about the top lawman in the black hat. Aleksandr Bastrykin is one of the top law enforcers in Russia, roughly equivalent to the head of the FBI, but his performance harks back to the bad old days of the Feds, when J. Edgar Hoover made deals with the Mob and told his officers to target political figures who offended his dark sensibilities. Bastrykin is also a self-confessed kidnapper and a plagiarist.
The facts about Bastrykin the copycat are well evidenced, embarassingly so. His 2004 book, Signs of the Hand: Dactyloscopy, about the science of fingerprinting, was a masterpiece of copying and pasting, principally from a book about forensics, The Century of the Detective, by German writer Jürgen Thorwald. [...] The great Masha Gessen noted in The New Yorker that Bastrykin, when he gave a talk at the Sorbonne in November 2013, remained calm when he was heckled about the Russian Investigative Committee's use of torture, but lost his rag when he was personally accused of plagiarism. Dear Reader: I hope you have already worked out the them here, that both Putin and his wannabe Sherlock Holmes steal other people's words.