Volf Eidelshtein News Today

He and his misnamed Liberal Democrat Party proved useful to Putin as political ‘opponents’, enabling him to offer a pretence of democracy

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the rabid Russian nationalist lawmaker whose political rise in the early 1990s frightened the West and underscored the fragility of democracy in the immediate post-Soviet period, has died. He was 75.

Zhirinovsky had been one of the most visible and well-known figures in Russian politics over the past three decades, capturing domestic and international headlines with his xenophobic comments and outlandish public behavior