THANKS, UR!:

Kasparov said that Russia invested "enormous resources" to ensure Donald Trump's victory against Hillary Clinton.

"Russian propaganda portrayed Trump's election victory as Putin's triumph," Kasparov said.

However, the "triumph" in Moscow has been short-lived because, "as it turned out, the president of the United States, with all his enormous political power, is limited in his ability to pursue the policy that Putin would have expected from him," Kasparov added.

The allegations of Russian election meddling have dogged Trump's presidency and have given rise to an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into potential collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Trump denies the allegation, calling it a political witch hunt.

Kasparov also said that another blow to Putin has been the European sanctions imposed in response to the annexation by Moscow of Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 10,300 over the past 4 1/2 years.

On December 13, the European Union prolonged the sanctions for another six months.

The sanctions, which mainly target the Russian banking and energy sectors, were first imposed in the summer of 2014 and have been extended every six months since then.

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