POLITICO USA
Vladimir Putin has been ascribed with holding vast powers: to hack American elections, to trick millions into believing in vast conspiracy theories, to move governments like chess pieces around the Middle East and Eastern Europe. All this without necessarily even lifting a finger
The Russian president is likely happy he can ride so far on reputation alone. Because when it comes to actually doing things, well, lately he doesn’t seem able to make much of an impact, at least not in Europe. Poisoning the opposition leader Alexei Navalny neither killed Navalny, nor the controversial Nord Stream II pipeline.
As the coronavirus rages at home, he’s spent the past year fooling around on Europe’s periphery. Yet those conflicts have shown off Turkey’s rising influence as much as his: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s direct intervention in Nagorno-Karabakh showed he can be a serious player on Putin’s turf, and the Turkish president’s incursions in the Mediterranean indirectly held up an EU response to events in Russia’s would-be client state Belarus.
Then again, both of those crises have shown Brussels’ inability to assert itself in its own backyard. And that’s where Putin’s influence remains. The mere threat of another Crimea is enough to keep even obstreperous capitals like Warsaw fretting over NATO.
It’s not like he’s going away anytime soon. Putin can now serve as president until 2036, thanks to a summer referendum. At 68, the former KGB officer may yet have some tricks up his sleeve: While Putin’s propaganda arm sows doubt about Western coronavirus vaccines online, Russia’s Sputnik V jab is now available in Moscow clinics — and potentially soon in Hungary. And with the U.S. still divided over whether the Kremlin tipped the 2016 election, a Biden White House is likely to treat Putin as the geopolitical threat he’s always imagined himself to be.