I'm fairly confident nothing will come of it, but the mere fact that the prison didn't completely hush it up, and word got out that it is being publicly investigated as a crime, is nothing short of sensational. After all, Putin was trained in this kind of procedure for thirty years.
As for Germany, the East is battling a mind-set that is foreign to the West. Merkel may know it, having grown up in the east, but her western party allies can't imagine it. The Socialists of the "realexistierender Sozialismus" refused to confront their common Nazi past, unlike the West, and merely declared themselves "Nazi-free." It was a convenient way for Germans living in the Soviet Occupation Zone to avoid having to deal with the millions of ex-Nazis living in their new German state when it was created in 1949. No ex-Nazis here? Nothing to deal with! That was easy! Nothing but good old Socialists here! We checked! Therefore, right-wing opposition to East Germany's Soviet style of rule festered unchecked for decades. All they had to do is lay low and wait, and they did. Combine that with the German legal system's reluctance to prosecute theft and family abuse of women as crimes (must show tolerance, after all), and you are pouring fertilizer on the AfD's quest for votes where they deserve none. Like our Republicans, they offer no solutions, only anger. Like in the USA, for many, that is enough. My wife was a German social worker (now retired). It drove her crazy how little the system was willing to do to protect abused women or pursue those engaged in theft, either collecting welfare in ten different towns under ten different names, outright embezzlement, or plain street aggression. She spent plenty of unpaid overtime counseling abused women and secretly getting them to shelters because the social services pretended to see no problem, or just wash their hands of it, saying their hands were tied.
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