A video that gives a stark and alarming assessment of Vladimir Putin’s motives for and criminal conduct during his interventions in and attacks on Georgia, Crimea, Syria and Ukraine is being widely circulated.
Below are some relevant excerpts.
On Putin’s character:
As a young man: “He’s scrappy, very ambitious, very, very greedy.”
During his KGB (FSB) years:
• He felt that he wasn’t trusted and that he didn’t trust the men there
• …he’s projecting one main myth about himself, which is that he’s a thug.
• He lashes out when he feels wronged, and then he quiets down, and everybody thinks it’s over. And then, when they least expect it, he lunges again.
• … he is vengeful. And he’s aggressive, and he’s reckless,
After his appointment as prime minister and, subsequently, as president:
• He personally perceives the world as essentially hostile, not just hostile to Russia, but hostile to him, hostile to people he loves, just a really dangerous place.
• …he has completely lost the ability to distinguish himself from his regime, his regime from the country—from the state, and the state from the country.
• …the fact that he was an accidental president, actually makes him feel more like he was chosen…
• Putin is really and truly convinced, and the people around him are really and truly convinced, that democracy is an unsound way of running things.
• He had never shown an ability to change course. He had never shown that he reacts to pressure with anything but aggression.
• …what changed when he saw people in the streets was actually much more conventional. They started arresting people. They changed the laws. They changed the laws to enable them to prosecute anybody for perceived violations of public assembly laws.
On (the expansion of) NATO and Russia’s response:
• …it is not a question of these countries asking to be part of NATO. It is merely a question of the United States deciding that NATO should expand to the Russian border. He’s also convinced that the Soviet Union got assurances from the United States that NATO would not be expanded.
• …what a lot of the investment of the military has been, is making plans for how are we going to fight this war and this other war? How are we going to re-annex parts of Finland, and how are we going to re-annex the Baltic states and Moldova and Ukraine?
On sanctions:
• …the step-by-step process was intended to show Putin that we mean business, and he has to stop. Like hell he’s going to stop, right? That’s not the kind of pushback that will make him stop. You know, again, there’s also basic misunderstanding that he thinks that making life worse for his people—I mean, we think that making life worse for Russians is going to make Putin stop. He has been making life worse for Russians for years, and it certainly hasn’t made him stop.
• The reason that he hates the sanctions is not because they put the squeeze on the Russian economy. He is concerned about a different set of sanctions. He’s concerned about personal sanctions against that—that really make things difficult for him and his friends who are banned from entry to this country, who are banned from having assets in this country, and who are essentially banned from doing any business involving U.S. currency, which really hampers their style.
• …after sanctions went into effect, Putin did something extraordinary, which is he made the sanctions worse. He introduced countersanctions,
On U.S.- Russia relations.
• Putin has portrayed and the Kremlin-controlled Russian media have portrayed both the wars in Ukraine and the wars here as proxy wars against the United States.
• Russia does not perceive itself as being at war with Ukraine. It perceives itself as being at war with the United States by proxy of Ukraine.
• Only the United States is big enough to go to war against, and only the United States is grand enough to mobilize people enough to have the kind of popularity that Putin has come to depend upon. …
As the unprovoked invasion of an independent Ukraine grinds through its 15th hellish day with no clear endgame in sight, readers might rightly ask, “What is so new about all this?”
What is fascinatingly new is that this revelation of the real, depraved Putin matryoshka took place five years ago.
The excerpts above are from a June 2017 interview with Masha Gessen, renowned journalist, author of “The Man Without a Face,” an enduring assessment of Russia’s War Criminal and, more recently, of “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.”
In the interview – “The Putin Files” — Gessen describes Putin’s motivations and actions during previous invasions, including the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
Prescient? Yes.
Authoritative? You bet!
It might as well be Ukraine 2022.
Watch and listen here to the entire interview.
