The idea was to isolate him, to make him a pariah, to put him in a box as punishment for brazen violations of international law. They kicked him out of their world leaders’ clubhouse, cut off his country’s economy, even issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes.
But Vladimir V. Putin does not look all that isolated these days. Mr. Putin, the Russian president with czar envy who invaded neighboring Ukraine without provocation, killing or injuring hundreds of thousands, is having something of a moment in the United States.
With the help of a populist former Fox News star and America’s richest man, Mr. Putin has gained a platform to justify his actions even as Russian and American journalists languish in his prisons. His favored candidate is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination while Congress weighs abandoning Ukraine to the tender mercies of Russian invaders.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mr. Putin’s filibuster-style appearance with Tucker Carlson on Elon Musk’s social media platform amid the security aid debate on Capitol Hill driven by Donald J. Trump offers a moment to reflect on the head-spinning transformation of American politics in recent years.
Plenty of Western news organizations have requested interviews since the 2022 invasion, as confirmed by Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, but the Kremlin chose Mr. Carlson because it saw him as more open than “the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”
Mr. Carlson pressed Mr. Putin to release Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia a year ago on espionage charges that he and his employer have vehemently denied, but barely challenged the Russian leader and let him talk at length uninterrupted.
While Robert S. Mueller’s investigators in 2019 found no criminal conspiracy between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin’s Russia during the 2016 campaign, the former president’s enigmatic affinity for the Russian ruler remains pronounced and, to many, still baffling.
Even in a recent campaign speech, Mr. Trump approvingly cited Mr. Putin’s opinion to argue that the Justice Department was unfairly prosecuting him, quoting the Russian saying that the legal case against the former president “shows the rottenness of the American political system.”
As he gets his message out on social media, watches American lawmakers balk at arming the victims of his aggression and awaits the outcome of the presidential race, the Russian leader sees a path out of the penalty box.
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