Meh. People like to claim that those World Bank loans were meant to get Yeltsin re-elected but it's not like Russia didn't already receive a ton of financial support anyway. They would have received those loans regardless, because they badly needed them (We should just have let it gone to shit, I guess). It's hardly 'stitching up' the election. Not to say that that election was really free and fair, because it wasn't, but that's on the Russians themselves. I know, I know, Russians like blaming the general 'West' for everything that's shit in their country (So basically, for everything), and that's exactly the mindset Putin and his cronies love. Russian citizens don't need to start thinking it's their right and responsibility to make political change or demand fair elections. Oh no.
The funniest thing is that the three major Russian parties actually ran the same three guys for president in 1996 as they did in 2018.
