Vladimir Putin

Following the celebrations of the Millennium and our entry into the 21st century, it was to be hoped that the days when a brutal dictator could bring mindless death and destruction to another country, and even to his own people, were over, and that the lessons of the past had been well and truly learned.A forlorn hope, as it transpires, for yet another monster has raised its ugly head above the slimy cesspit which such monsters inhabit, one to rival those of the past such as Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot.For now, we have Vladimir Putin, a depraved, deranged, warmongering megalomaniac who threatens the peace of the entire planet. In former times the appropriate description of Putin would have been 'evil'; 'a monster'; 'the Devil incarnate'; 'ghoulish', 'an excrescence', etcetera, but we no longer live in the Middle Ages and such appellations no longer suffice. And anyway, what adjective exists to describe a person who has no respect for human life?In their place we have the terminology of