Russian President Vladimir Putin is well on his way to becoming a mad ruler. Experts explain why.Image: IMAGO/SNA / Pavel Bednyakov
International
A year after the start of the war, the Russian president became the “crazy king” – with terrible consequences.
Philipp Löpfe / watson.ch
Mad rulers who bring misfortune to their people is a popular motif in world literature. Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, for example, or the ivory dealer Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of darkness”. The signs that Vladimir Putin has also become such a crazy ruler have become unmistakable. Fiona Hill and Angela Stent headline their latest essay on the Russian President in the magazine “Foreign affairs” then also with “The Kremlin’s Grand Delusion”.
Born in England, Hill was a security advisor to George W. Bush and Donald Trump and is a recognized expert on Russia and recently published a book about Putin. Stent is Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University in Washington.
Russia expert Fiona Hill and former adviser to former US President Donald Trump. Image: imago images / KEVIN DIETSCH
Different circumstances make mad rulers possible, and different characteristics characterize them. Here are a few typical ones:
absolute power
Hill and Stent quote Rene Nyberg, former Finnish ambassador to Moscow, as follows: “I never imagined that I would ever miss the Politburo (the most powerful organ of the former USSR). But now there is no political organization at all in Russia, which has the power to hold the President and Commander-in-Chief accountable.”
Putin’s power is absolute. This is also emphasized by Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton – the author of the widely acclaimed book “Putin’s Net” – in the “Washington Post”. They quote former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev as follows: “Members of the elite know that war is a mistake, but they are afraid to do anything about it, because they have gotten used to the fact that Putin decides everything on his own.“Bondarev was stationed in Geneva until almost a year ago and left the diplomatic service in protest against the war.
history falsification
Putin is considered a passionate historian, but he is anything but accurate when it comes to the truth. He disputes the right to exist Ukraine and misrepresents the eastward expansion of NATO. The Yale historian Marie Elise Sarotte has written a book about it. In the “Financial Times” she puts the facts straight.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was Boris Yeltsin who campaigned for the huge empire to be broken up. The Russian President at the time did not want to also bear the costs of the so-called “Stan states” (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, etc.) and therefore called on the satellites to become independent.
The Ukrainians, who had been hoping for independence for a long time, gratefully accepted the offer. In 1991 they held a referendum in which more than 90 percent of the population voted for self-employment. Even among the majority Russian speakers People a majority was achieved in Crimea and Donbass.
When Putin came to power, he famously described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”. At the same time, he repeatedly emphasized that the West, and in particular the USA would have fooled Russia. NATO has made a sacred promise not to expand its influence further east and to honor Russia’s security concerns.
Former US President George H. Bush with the first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin.Image: www.imago-images.de / Courtesy Everett Collection
That is not right. It is true that James Baker, then US Secretary of State, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then German Foreign Minister, discussed such an arrangement with the Russians. However, these discussions were always speculative and, above all, they were not supported by the two decisive power holders. Both US President George H. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl never backed such a promise. There is also no written agreement on this.
Because the tale of the alleged promise not to expand NATO to the east is also rife in this country, this correction is important. Therefore again: The West has not broken any promises in this regard, while Putin did. Namely, Ukraine had on their nuclear weapons renounced – at that time it was the third largest nuclear power – and in return received a promise from Russia and the USA that they would stand up for their secure independence.
Putin broke this promise back in 2014 with the illegal invasion of Crimea, and even more so now with the “special military operation” against Ukraine.
brutalization and nationalism
A horrific video shows the execution of an alleged traitor from the Wagner mercenary group with a sledgehammer. Instead of horror, this video caused admiration in Russia. The sledgehammer has become a symbol of Russian determination, and Yegveny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary force – a man once imprisoned for armed robbery – is one of Putin’s inner circle.
Symbol of Russian masculinity: Jegweni PrigozhinImage: Pool EPA via AP / Sergei Ilnitsky
Putin’s “special military operation” is not only causing untold suffering and horror in Ukraine. It also brutalizes its own people. “The Company has gone haywire,” Sergei Chernyshov, principal of a private school in Novosibirsk, told the New York Time. “Governments have turned the notion of good and evil on its head.”
In concrete terms, this means that, as in the case of the Hitler Youth or the Komsomol, the youth movement of the Communist Party of the USSR, again Children be indoctrinated and raised in a false patriotism. It is also said that Putin has recently adopted a spooky death cult and celebrated heroic deaths. It’s better to die in the field than from cirrhosis of the liver, he recently proclaimed. Meanwhile, he even accuses the West of “Satanism.”
At the same time, Putin has the war in Ukraine stylized into a struggle for survival by Russia against the West. He does not want to negotiate with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, but directly with Washington. “His aim remains to achieve an agreement reached at Yalta in 1945 between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in which the West accepted Moscow’s dominance in Eastern Europe,” note Hill/Stent.
Vladimir Putin twists history and portrays Russia as a victim.Credit: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire / Adrien Fillon
Putin is delusional in sticking to this goal, whatever the cost. And it costs a lot. The losses of the Russian army are now estimated at around 200,000 men. Around a million mostly well-educated people have left Russia, either to protest against the war or for fear of being drafted.
On the battlefield, the Russian army has largely failed. The fact that the President changes his generals faster than the President of the United States does not change that FC Schalke his trainers.
Nonetheless, Putin’s destructive mania seems to be unshakeable. “Putin’s message to Ukraine and the world is that victory will belong to Russia and that Moscow will always win,” note Hill/Stent.
