Elections in which the winner is known is not elections, but ritual lowering the ballot into the urn Let's start with the obvious: Vladimir Putin usurped power. Today I can hardly understand how the Russians, including me, bought me in that trick: “no more than two in a row,” and here it is not in a row, which means it seems to be legal. Putin is squeezing the third presidential term and aimed at the fourth, and this is anyway more than the “two terms”, no matter whether in a row or not.