It’s our greatest nightmare, the psychotic warmonger with an itchy finger on the world’s destruct button. Adolf Hitler — but with nukes.
Usually it’s the stuff of lurid spy novels, but this week’s actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin have prompted several Kremlin analysts to pose this as a serious question: just how far will the Russian strongman go before anyone can stop him?
Early Friday morning, Ukraine’s armed forces said they had distributed 18,999 assault rifles in the capital Kyiv and urged people to stay home and make Molotov cocktails.
Putin has claimed his goal is to protect those subjected to genocide and bullying and his aim the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, a democracy led by a Jewish president, Volodymr Zelensky, who likened Russia’s invasion to that of Nazi Germany’s invasion in World War 2.
These are terrifying times for the 44-million people in Ukraine and horrifying for the rest of the continent, witnessing a major power invading a European neighbour for the first time in 75 years. As fears grow of a possible third world war, dozens of both civilians and soldiers have already died in the first days of what Germany calls “Putin’s War”.
As Poland, Modova, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary brace for the arrival of an expected influx of up to 5-million refugees, according to the UN children’s agency, Unicef, some analysts and leaders are wondering whether Putin has lost his marbles.
Putin, a 69-year-old former East German Stasi officer and later a KGB agent, is the longest-serving Russian leader since the dictator Joseph Stalin, who ruled from 1922 until 1952, dying the following year. Putin, in power now for 22 years, in 2020 won a referendum allowing him to remain president until 2036.
Born on October 7 1952 in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), the Russian president grew up in an apartment shared by three families. The son of working-class parents, Putin’s net worth is now estimated at $200bn (about R3-trillion), according to former Hermitage Capital Management CEO Bill Browder, who testified before the US Senate judiciary committee.
“Everything that we believed turned out to be wrong,” one analyst told the New York Times. “I don’t understand the motivations, the goals or the possible results,” said another. “What is happening is very strange.”
Milos Zeman, the Czech president and long one of Putin’s staunchest supporters, denounced him as a “madman” after the invasion, which one local journalist characterised as Putin having “gone full Hitler”, a reference to the Blitzkrieg advances Hitler’s troops used to conquer neighbouring territories.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian businessman and Putin opponent, said on Friday he believed the Russian president was “capable of anything”, even “pressing the red button” to launch a nuclear war.
When the 14-year-old Putin broke a classmate's leg, the future president had said some 'only understand force'
— Vladimir Putin's former teacher
Khodorkovsky said the opposition in Russia was in a far worse state than when he was behind bars as a Putin opponent in 2003, citing the case of the imprisoned opposition activist, Alexei Navalny.
“I was at least tried in the Moscow City Court, while Navalny is being tried in his penal colony.”
Navalny is serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence and faces a fresh criminal trial on new embezzlement charges that could see him incarcerated for a further 15 years.
His tough upbringing is reflected in an anecdote told by one of his former teachers, Vera Gurevich, who said when the 14-year-old Putin broke a classmate’s leg, the future president had said that some “only understand force”. In 2015, Putin said “if a fight is inevitable, you must strike first”.
This past week, some Kremlin analysts have raised questions about his mental stability, about a leader who, like the US president, has a briefcase that could launch up to 6,000 nuclear warheads and begin a global annihilation.
As debate continued about whether Putin was a psychotic warmonger, others looked at his history to explain his behaviour.
Putin was based in East Germany as the Soviet Union gradually collapsed between 1989 and 1991. He saw it as a personal defeat. He claimed he had been forced to drive a taxi to make ends meet when he returned home.
Now that he has assumed power and tightened control, he has become more insular and less tolerant of opposition. Some say he wishes to restore the glory of the Soviet empire.
His tendency towards isolation has been amplified by his precautions against Covid-19, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful and obedient courtiers. According to The Guardian, “He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.”
Analysts in Moscow’s foreign policy establishment had overwhelmingly characterised Putin’s military build-up around Ukraine as an elaborate and astute bluff in recent months, but many admitted this week they had monumentally misjudged a man they had spent decades studying.
He has found himself in an information bubble which forms a very distorted picture of the world in his eyes ... what does that mean for the rest of us? It means he’s very dangerous
— Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Khodorkovsky said of Putin: “He has found himself in an information bubble which forms a very distorted picture of the world in his eyes ... what does that mean for the rest of us? It means he’s very dangerous.
“Does it mean that he’s capable of pressing the red button? The nuclear button? I hope that he hasn’t gone that far yet in his understanding of the world, but one could never be confident about this,” the Russian dissident said.
Like a US president, Putin has access to a nuclear briefcase, the Chegets, with its nuclear launch code.
And, like the US president, there are checks and balances to ensure Armageddon is the absolute last resort. However, that presupposes that his handpicked sycophants would miraculously develop the spine to deter him.
The Federation of American Scientists estimates that Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads, even more than the US.
Putin this week made a thinly veiled reference to them when he launched the war on Ukraine: “Whoever would try to stop us and further create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any outcome.”
Emma Claire Foley, a researcher at Global Zero, a disarmament advocacy group, said, “Nuclear weapons are an interesting exception to the general rule that the psychology of world leaders is less important than the systems they work in.
“Don’t assume that this could proceed in an orderly fashion. It could spin out of control very easily,” she said.
Another political commentator quoted Machiavelli: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”
The last word must surely go to Ivan Urgant, the most prominent late-night comedian on Russian state television, who on his show earlier this month had ridiculed the idea of a looming war.
On Thursday he posted a black square on Instagram along with the words: “Fear and pain”.
• Sources: New York Times, Al Jazeera, Guardian, BBC, CNN
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