Free Republic

VLADIMIR Putin is losing grip on power and his regime faces total collapse as "predators" circle around due to his disastrous handling of the war in Ukraine, claims a KGB expert. Putin can no longer keep at bay competing power groups that want to take over the Kremlin. The Russian investigative journalist said Putin faced a "lunch of the predators" and a "war of all against all" in his inner circle. More than two decades ago Albats wrote The State within a State about how the Soviet-era KGB secret service had taken control of the new Russia. Now she sees...

…. Putin's more than 22 years as a mob boss running a mafia state from Moscow have seen him descend from reformer and uneasy ally to tyrant and global pariah. Once upon a time he was pictured posing outside Downing Street with Tony Blair and riding in a golf cart with US President George W. Bush. But now paranoid and delusional Vlad remains holed up in the bubble-like environment of the Kremlin as he turns 70. Furiously ranting about the West in rambling speeches and wildly swinging his nuclear sabre, Putin's long cultivated image as a cold and calculating strongman...