Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,
The salience isn't whether he truly believes it, but whether his Foreign Ministry and intelligence services politicize their assessments of this scenario to conform to what they think he wants to hear, which would go against what he earlier said about the need to abandon wishful thinking.
Putin predicted at the Valdai Club's annual summit in early October that "they will fall apart without any help from us" in response to a question about whether Russia "should just go ahead and break [the EU] up, so it is easier to deal with individual countries" due to the bloc's bans on building ties with Russia. This was popularly interpreted among many "Non-Russian Pro-Russians" (NRPRs) as a serious prediction despite the lighthearted context in which it was clearly being asked due to these folks' wishful thinking.
Putin's words are treated as gospel whenever they align with whatever many NRPRs want to have happen and casually dismissed as part of a "5D chess master plan" to "psyche out" his opponents whenever they go against their expectations like his READ MORE AT SOURCE »
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