Vlad, are you letting me down?

A former national security chief planning to challenge President Vladimir Putin has been missing since Thursday, his campaign staff said Saturday.
Hours earlier, the Central Elections Commission approved the presidential candidacy of liberal Ivan Rybkin, who has harshly criticized Putin.

..Rybkin this week unofficially launched his campaign with a full-page open letter in the newspaper Kommersant accusing Putin of being Russia's most powerful oligarch and of ruling by fear. In the letter, Rybkin said power and money are inseparable under dictatorship, and he claimed to have information linking Putin to big business.

Rybkin, a national security council chief under former President Boris Yeltsin, has pushed in recent years for talks between the Kremlin and Chechen rebels on ending the fighting in the breakaway republic. Putin firmly refuses to countenance negotiations.   article


Okay, Vlad, I'll withhold judgment here for a while till we get this cleared up. But you know I never was truly comfortable loving you.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I must keep repeating this to myself until it becomes second nature, so I don't get fooled again. Perhaps I could get the neoconvicts to add that to their "9-11 Saddam bad" broken record. But probably not, huh?

Rybkin has been supported by Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who was a powerful Kremlin insider in the Yeltsin years but who fell out with Putin and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom.

Although Rybkin's candidacy was approved, an elections commission spokesman said the commission found tens of thousands of apparently counterfeit signatures among the submissions and has forwarded evidence to prosecutors.

It's those rich, fraudulent corporate oil mongers who undoubtedly have CIA help trying to set you up, isn't it Vlad? Right? Vlad?