that Vladimir Putin is still permitted to go freely about his evil ways, which in the most recent instance have brought about the deaths of the 298 passengers and crew members of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, and who now lie unbelievably and unnervingly, after a fall of miles through the sky into  a glorious field of sun flowers, in the farmlands of Eastern Ukraine?

But yes, halas!, it’s all true. It happened, and will probably still happen as long as Putin is given free reign. Only now, some three days after the Boeing fell to the ground, probably struck by a Russian missile, are the bodies of flight 17  being gathered from the fields and placed broken and unrecognized within the cold and dark of refrigerated freight cars.

In a New Republic article of this week Julia Ioffe tells us what the Russians themselves are permitted to know, and therefore believe? That the Boeing 777 was full of corpses when it left Amsterdam, that the Ukrainian military had mistaken MH 17 for Putin’s presidential plane and shot it down, that MH17 is actually MH370, that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared into the Indian Ocean, that the plane didn’t disappear at all, “it was taken to an American military base, Diego-Garcia.”

Boris Yeltsin could not have known what he was doing to his country, and through his country, as long as it was well supplied with nukes and natural gas, to the entire world, when he gave us Vladimir Putin.

But I don’t forgive him.