Putin’s madness Seoul: North Korea fires two short-range missiles

Mad rulers bringing misfortune to their people are a popular subject in world literature. Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, for example, or the ivory merchant Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The signs that Vladimir Putin has also become such a crazy ruler have become undeniable. Fiona Hill and Angela Stent call their latest essay on the Russian president in Foreign Affairs magazine “The Kremlin’s Grand Delusion”.

A native of England, Hill was a security adviser to George W. Bush and Donald Trump, is considered a proven expert on Russia, and recently published a book on Putin. Stent is a professor emeritus at Georgetown University in Washington.

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 saying: “I never thought I would ever miss the Politburo (the most powerful organ of the former USSR). But now there is no political organization in Russia at all that has the power to hold the president and the commander-in-chief to account.”

Putin’s power is absolute. This is also emphasized by Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton – the author of the acclaimed book “Putin’s Net” – in the “Washington Post”. They quote former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev as saying: “Members of the elite know that war is a mistake, but they are afraid to do anything about it because they are used to Putin deciding everything alone.” Bondarev was stationed in Geneva until almost a year ago and left the diplomatic service in protest against the war.

falsification of history

Putin is considered a passionate historian, but he is anything but accurate when it comes to the truth. He disputes Ukraine’s right to exist and portrays NATO’s eastward expansion as false. Yale historian Marie Elise Sarotte has written a book about it. In the “Financial Times” she lists the facts.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was Boris Yeltsin who campaigned to split up the vast empire. The then Russian president did not want to 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 long hoped for independence, gratefully accepted the offer. In 1991 they held a referendum in which more than 90 percent of the population voted for self-employment. A majority was reached even among the predominantly Russian-speaking people of Crimea and Donbass.

When Putin came to power, he described the collapse of the USSR as the “biggest catastrophe of the 20th century”. At the same time, he repeatedly emphasized that the West, and especially the US, had deceived Russia. NATO has made a sacred pledge not to extend its influence further east and to honor Russia’s security concerns.

That is not good. It is true that James Baker, then US Secretary of State, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then German Secretary of State, discussed such an agreement with the Russians. However, these discussions were always speculative and, above all, were not supported by the two ruling powers. Neither US President George H. Bush nor German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have ever supported such a promise. There is no written agreement on this either.

Since the story of the supposed promise not to expand NATO to the east is also rampant in this country, this correction is important. So again, the West has not broken any promises in this regard, while Putin did. Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons – it was the third largest nuclear power at the time – and in return received a promise from Russia and the US that they would stand up for their secure independence.

Putin broke this promise in 2014 with the illegal invasion of Crimea, and even more so now with the “special military operation” against Ukraine.

brutalization and nationalism

A gruesome video shows the execution of an alleged traitor to 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 army – a man who was once in prison for armed robbery – belongs to Putin’s inner circle.

Putin’s “special military operation” is not only causing unspeakable suffering and horror in Ukraine. It also brutalizes its own population. “Society is disrupted,” Sergei Chernyshov, director of a private school in Novosibirsk, told the New York Time. “The rulers have turned the idea of ​​good and evil upside down.”

In concrete terms, this means re-indoctrinated and educated children into false patriotism, as was the case with the Hitler Youth or the Komsomol, the youth movement of the Communist Party of the USSR. It is also said that Putin recently indulged in a ghoulish death cult and celebrated heroic deaths. It is 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 stylized the war in Ukraine as Russia’s struggle for survival against the West. He does not want to negotiate with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, but directly with Washington. “His goal remains to reach an agreement reached in Yalta in 1945 between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in which the West accepted Moscow’s dominance in Eastern Europe,” notes Hill/Stent.

Putin is delusional in clinging to this goal at all costs. And it costs a lot. The losses of the Russian army are now estimated at about 200,000 men. About a million mostly well-educated people have left Russia, either in protest against the war or fear of being drafted.

On the battlefield, the Russian army has largely failed. The fact that the chairman changes generals faster than the chairman of FC Sion changes coaches does not change that.

Nevertheless, Putin’s destructive mania seems unwavering. “Putin’s message to Ukraine and the world is that victory will belong to Russia and Moscow will always win,” notes Hill/Stent.