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You're spot on about the Russian dynamic. Nothing irks Putin more than the fact Russia collapsed. He is older now and I think he is realizing he needs to move more urgently to achieve what was his goal. I think he expected Ukraine to go a lot more smoothly, honestly, but I think that was driven by misinformation given to him by his own people, for the purpose of appeasing him. The dude honestly expected to be greeted with flower. Oops...
But yes, Russia LOVES driving chaos. It's very easy to do and Western, Democratic-based countries are much more vulnerable to it than places like China, obviously. They also love to hack. They hacked the Clinton campaign, obviously, and then I think made some attempts at hacking those on the right. I want to say Marco Rubio's. But a couple points really stood out to me and continue to stand out, and those points are these:
1. Several associates of the Trump campaign met with Russia. That includes Papadapoulos (pled guilty), Trump (April 2016), Sessions (April 2016) and Kushner (April 2016), Junior, Manafort and Flynn (who lied and then was found guilty, and then pardoned).
2. The Russians (to my knowledge) never released anything damaging on Trump, and never attempted to damage his campaign.
3. Trump has never spoken poorly of Vladimir Putin, and publicly sided with him over the NSA on live television.
Those are the main points. There are a host of other small points that, when you aggregate everything together, paints a really awful picture.
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