Vladimir Putin’s posture at the height of the Russia-Ukraine crisis reveals a “paranoid” and isolated leader, say Western officials and analysts.
The live meeting of the Russian Security Council on Monday, in the very solemn setting of the Kremlin, froze the whole world. The Russian president, seated alone in front of a large table, questions the main security officials of his country, who parade one after the other in front of a desk, like students during a great oral. “Are you proposing to start a negotiation process […] or to recognize the sovereignty of the “separatist” republics in Ukraine? he asks, with a smirk, to the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin.
“Speak clearly,” he says to the person concerned, who has started to stammer. “I will support the proposal” for recognition, Sergei Naryshkin then said. “I will support or I support […] Yes or no ? ” gets angry Vladimir Putin, humiliating this senior official live.
A few hours later, the head of the Kremlin delivered a wild speech to the nation denying the historical legitimacy of Ukraine and accusing NATO of wanting to use this country as a “springboard” to attack Russia. He ends it by recognizing the two self-proclaimed pro-Russian “republics” of Donbass.
Ukraine is an artificial creation of “Bolshevik and Communist Russia”, he asserts, recalling that it is made up of “Russian lands”. “We are ready to show you what a real decommunization of Ukraine means,” he adds, threateningly.
“Delusional”
This country intends to engage in “military actions” against Russia with the help of Westerners and by acquiring nuclear weapons, accuses Vladimir Putin. “The United States and NATO have shamelessly begun” to make Ukrainian territory a “theater of potential military operations” by sending contingents there and carrying out military maneuvers there, he further asserts.
“Paranoia”, “cynicism”… The reactions fuse, especially in Paris, where the aborted attempt at mediation by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, with his Russian counterpart is badly experienced.
“There was an extremely violent analysis, a little delusional or paranoid, but unfortunately constructed on the part of Vladimir Putin […] with a lot of historical lies”, summarizes the French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune.
During his trip to Moscow on February 7, Emmanuel Macron had already told journalists that he had found Vladimir Putin “steeper, more isolated, gone into a kind of drift both ideological and security”.
The Russian head of state is accustomed to live humiliations, as well as muscular geopolitical speeches, imbued with macho references. “Everything he said on Monday, he had already said before,” notes Michel Eltchaninoff, author of Inside the mind of Vladimir Putinwho has been peeling his speeches for 20 years.
“Amazing effect”
But this time, the dramatization was at its height, against a backdrop of the sound of boots in Ukraine and uncertainty about the Kremlin’s real intentions.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel had already expressed some reservations about the psychological state of Vladimir Putin at the time of the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the start of the pro-Russian separatist offensive in the east of Ukraine in 2014.
“He lost all contact with reality […] He is in another world, ”she told President Barack Obama, according to comments reported by the American press.
“There is a mixture of rationality and total closure from reality […] a form of detachment from Putin’s reality in the name of his ideology, which can be described as paranoid”, considers Michel Eltchaninoff, the editor-in-chief of Philosophy Magazine.
“We have always said that he was a pragmatic leader, a good tactician. Will he sacrifice his pragmatism in the name of his ideology? It’s possible. In any case, he seems ready to go to war, ”he underlines.