At the start of this strange US presidential election cycle only a hubristic Vladimir Putin might have expected that he and the Russian-influenced world would play such a prominent role, beyond that is the usual Reaganesque invocations of the former Soviet Union’s inherently evil nature.
Yet the resignation of Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and his preemptive sidelining by a new team of advisers, was at least in part a result of machinations out of Moscow. It came after increasing scrutiny of Manafort’s past involvement with Putin-aligned interests in Ukraine and Trump’s noticeable softening of the established Republican position on …read more