For two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin has struck his rivals as reckless and impulsive, but his behavior in ordering an invasion of Ukraine — and now putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert — has some in the West questioning whether he has become dangerously unstable.
In the past week, Putin has rambled on television about Ukraine, repeated conspiracy theories about neo-Nazism and Western aggression, and berated his own foreign intelligence chief on camera from the other side of a high-domed Kremlin hall where he sat alone.
Now, with the West’s sanctions threatening to cripple Russia’s already hobbled economy, Putin has ordered the higher state of readiness for nuclear weapons, blaming the sanctions and what he called “aggressive statements against our country.”
Photo: Reuters
The uncertainty over his thinking adds a wild card to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Western officials must confront Putin as they also wonder whether he comprehends or cares about cataclysmic consequences — or perhaps is intentionally preying on the long-held suspicions about him.
An aide to French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke with Putin on Monday, said the Russian leader answered Macron “without showing irritation, in a very clinical and a very determined manner.”
“We can see that with President Putin’s state of mind, there is a risk of escalation,” added the aide, who spoke anonymously in line with the French presidency’s practice on sensitive talks. “There is a risk of manipulation from President Putin to justify what is unjustifiable.”
Foreign leaders have long tried to get inside Putin’s head and have been wrong before, and Putin in this crisis is showing many of the same traits that he has displayed since becoming Russia’s leader.
Putin has directed invasions of neighbors, unspooled conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods, and ordered audacious operations like interfering in the past two US presidential elections.
He single-handedly made landmark decisions like the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, consulting only his narrow inner circle of KGB veterans and keeping everyone else in the dark. He has long been surrounded by lieutenants reluctant to risk their careers by urging caution, let alone voicing adverse opinions.
He has also talked about nuclear war and once mused that such a conflict would end in Russians going “to heaven as martyrs.”
Experts say Putin could be using the specter of nuclear conflict to fracture the growing support for Ukraine’s defense and to force concessions. His latest comments also suggest the sanctions are working.
“We have to know this is a sign that we’re getting to him,” said Jim Townsend, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “We just have to take that into account. We have to be cool.”
Officials in the US were alarmed by a 5,000-word essay published under Putin’s name in July last year that argued Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and blamed any divisions on foreign plots.
One US official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the government’s internal thinking, said the intelligence community was concerned that Putin was operating from “an emotional place” and driven by long-simmering grievances.
Macron went to meet with Putin and had several long telephone calls before the invasion. A top official in Macron’s office last week said that Putin was “no longer the same,” had become “more stiff, more isolated,” and at his core had veered into the approach now playing out.
During a five-hour dinner between the two leaders, Putin spent more time railing about NATO expansion and the 2014 revolution in Ukraine than discussing the immediate crisis.
Putin’s perceived self-insulation was highlighted in official meetings broadcast by state television. He faced foreign leaders and close aides from the opposite end of a long table. No Russian official who spoke gave a dissenting view.
“He’s not had that many people having direct inputs to him,” said US Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. “So we’re concerned that this isolated individual [has] become a megalomaniac in terms of his notion of himself being the only historic figure that can rebuild old Russia or recreate the notion of the Soviet sphere.”
Putin has long been committed to recovering lost glory, suppressing dissent and keeping neighbors in Moscow’s orbit.
In 2005, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
His public dismissals of Ukrainian sovereignty go back many years.
In 2008, he is reported to have told then-US president George W. Bush: “George, you have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country.”
Two years ago, Putin endorsed the latest version of a Russian nuclear deterrent policy that allows for the use of atomic weapons in response to a nuclear attack or aggression involving conventional weapons that “threatens the very existence of the state.”
Putin’s associate Dmitry Medvedev, who served as placeholder president when Putin shifted into the prime minister’s seat due to term limits, in 2019 said that a move by the West to cut Russia off from the SWIFT financial system would amount to an effective declaration of war — a signal that the Kremlin might view Western sanctions as a threat on a par with military aggression.
The sanctions announced in the past week include cutting key Russian banks out of SWIFT. The ruble has since plummeted.
James Acton, codirector of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that he did not believe nuclear war was imminent, but there was real potential for escalation. Another possibility was Putin would use increasingly brutal non-nuclear tactics in Ukraine.
Acton suggested finding an “off-ramp” that might allow Putin a perceived victory. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the US secretly agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling back from Cuba.
However, Acton added: “I’m not entirely clear whether he in his own mind knows what an off-ramp looks like right now.”
Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear policy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said he was not immediately worried about a nuclear escalation, but one danger of sending public signals about nuclear weapons is that they can be difficult to interpret, just as the world is trying now to understand Putin’s latest moves and intentions.
“He is isolated, and making poor decisions and losing, and that is dangerous,” Lewis said.
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