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Thanks to American negotiator Steve Witkoff, Vladimir Putin is finally being recognized as the great, selfless humanitarian he is.
“You are a humanitarian, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you,” Witkoff said Tuesday.
Certainly, Putin’s legacy is a record of altruistic achievement that can be neither denied nor surpassed.
The KGB alum loves his country and its people so deeply that after more than two and a half decades in their service, he still won’t retire from his exceedingly stressful day job at the Kremlin.
He loves his neighbors so much that he invites them, rather insistently, to live under his benevolent rule.
And he loves Americans so much that he often won’t let them go home.
A man is only as good as he is to his family, though, and Putin’s treatment of even the most grating of his fellow Russians has been exemplary.
Just ask Sergei Yushenkov, the liberal leader shot dead outside of his home in 2003 only a few hours after his party had been officially certified for the upcoming election cycle.
Or Alexander Litvinenko, the whistleblower who Putin remembered preferred polonium in his tea and, in his thoughtfulness, ensured that he had it served to him all the way over in London.
Or Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader who met the same fate as Yushenkov in 2015.
Or Alexei Navalny, the would-be reformer sent to an Arctic penal colony where he perished with South American dart frog poison in his system.
Putin never forgets the little people, either; his forced conscription system sends young men to new and exciting places, like the front lines of his war of aggression on Ukraine, where 450,000 Russians have died and 1.4 million have been counted as casualties as of a July estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
On the other side of that conflict, there are another half-million-plus casualties and somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 dead.
More than 17,000 civilians have been confirmed dead by the United Nations, which concedes that the actual amount of innocent blood spilt is much, much higher.
And speaking of innocents, the young Russians have been tasked with abducting even younger Ukrainians they find.
Estimates suggest tens of thousands of children have been shipped off to “re-education camps.”
The figures don’t do justice to the stories, though.
A deliberate Russian attack on Maternity Hospital No. 3 in Mariupol, causing four deaths, 17 injuries and a stillbirth.
Women as old as 75 and girls as young as four raped by Russian soldiers.
The summary execution of POWs.
Truly, there is no limit to what Putin is willing to do to, er, for his fellow man.
Then there are the Americans he’s taken a liking to.
Americans like Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in 2023 on bogus espionage charges, subjected to a sham show trial and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Like Paul Whelan, a Marine Corps veteran arrested in 2018 on more bogus charges, sentenced to a similarly absurd 16-year sentence and sent to a labor camp.
Like Brittney Griner, the WNBA star sentenced to nine years in a penal colony over vape cartridges.
And like Stephen Hubbard, the 74-year-old veteran and retired teacher who could be seen being beaten with a sandal in one video recorded after he was taken prisoner in 2022.
Gershkovich and Whelan were only released upon the return of detained Russian agents who had actually committed crimes, like FSB assassin Vadim Krasikov.
And likewise, Griner was swapped for Viktor Bout, a convicted terrorist known as the “Merchant of Death.”
Hubbard was finally released on Wednesday, a few days after the Trump administration blocked sanctions that were set to take effect under the Lindsey Graham Act.
If Putin didn’t value the company of his American friends, why would he demand so much to let them go?
You are a humanitarian, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you.