Putin's words and actions question his rationality

Nemtsov, who loudly opposed Russian aggression against Ukraine at the time, was shot dead near the Kremlin next February.

Seven years later Putin has launched a massive and unprohibited escalation of war in Ukraine. His words and actions in the weeks before the invasion and in the days since Russia launched the first missiles on February 24th have raised an unpleasant and increasingly inevitable question: Does he behave rationally?

For many, the very fact of the conquest suggests that he is making decisions (rational or otherwise) based on an unstable mix of emotions and misinterpretation of facts, which has caused unnecessary bloodshed and certainly will cause more.

It is now clear that he is really divorced from reality. This is a tragedy,” wrote Mark Galeotti, an author and expert on Russia.

Putin has long been viewed as pragmatic, usually acting on the basis of a cool estimate of what he can do to achieve his goals and how far it can go without consequences.

But conquest and war may suggest otherwise. If nothing else, his Laseric focus on regaining Ukraine's control three decades after the Soviet fall seems to have caused him to lose his vision or turn his eyes away from the good of his country.

For now, only one thing is clear: Putin gave priority to his personal obsession over the interests of Russia”, wrote Kadri Liik, a senior member of the European Council for Foreign Relations, in the February 25th article “Obsession War: Why is Putin risking Russia's future?

Putin's decision to launch a major military offensive against a country, whose people he has said are “a” with the Russians may look like the culmination of irrationality.

Another possible explanation is that Putin saw the attack as the best way to achieve his intentions that he was acting rationally, in a way, but based on a set of claims, beliefs or assumptions with large flaws.

For years, Putin has signaled his desire to bring Ukraine under Moscow's control. And he set in motion plans for the invasion since last spring, increasing troop levels near the borders of Ukraine and then increasing those numbers steadily since autumn.

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As the world looked at him with fear, and the United States warned that an invasion could come every day, many people who have seen Putin for years were among those who believed that he was likely to be held back until an amazing talk last week badly undermined that belief.

In the February 21st speech, Putin doubled his earlier efforts to portray Ukraine as an illegal state that does not deserve sovereignty and should not exist unless it is linked to Russia.

He also reiterated his false claim that the government is committing “the genocide” in Donbas, where separatists backed by Russia whose fight against Kiev has led to more than 13,200 deaths since 2014, control parts of the two provinces.

Since then, Putin has raised more remarks that have sparked concerns about his rationality. On February 25th, a day after the invasion began, he described the government of Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskiy as a drug-dependent “gang” and “neo-Nazi”.

For people who have studied Putin or dealt with him personally, his final words and actions suggest a surprising change.

I've seen and heard Putin for over 30 years. He has changed,” tweeted on February 26th, Michael McFaul, US Ambassador to Russia in 2012-14 and professor at Stanford University.

It sounds completely disconnected from reality. He sounds rampant”, he said.

Even after the invasion of Crime in 2014 and the other actions he has taken since then, “Putin has always appeared to me as an extremely pragmatic leader”, Tatyana Stanovaya, an expert on the Kremlin and founder of the R group of political analysis, was quoted as saying. Political, in a February 25th article in The Guardian.

But now that he's entered this war against Ukraine, logic in decision is all about emotion, it's not rational. ”

Marco Rubio, an American senator from Florida and deputy head of the Senate's Committee for Intelligence, appeared to suggest in a Twitter post on February 26th that he had classified information from American intelligence agencies regarding Putin's mental state.

I wish I could share more, but for now I can say it's very clear to many people that something is wrong with Putin”, he wrote.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Putin is operating mainly within a small circle of advisers, most of them harsh.

This may mean that decisions are made by a drastic amount of data and on the basis of information that may be incomplete, incorrect, or filtered through the prejudices of his closest associates.

Very fundamental acts

Beyond that inner circle, Putin may also be sensitive to the encouragement of officials, lawmakers and state media, which the president, in turn, consumes.

Many observers have said the Russian military campaign appears to have advanced more slowly than Putin could have planned. The images of destroyed Russian vehicles and soldiers killed or captured in Ukraine have added to the impression.

“Of course, we can only make initiative conclusions so far, but the Russian Army is committing some very fundamental mistakes from the strategic level to that tactical level,” wrote Rob Lee, a former US Marine Corps officer and war policy researcher at KingX College in London.

“Putin also put his army in a very bad situation with unrealistic intentions and without warning too much”, he wrote on Twitter on February 28th.

The Russian military campaign “looked terrible” because the assumptions behind it “were crazy”, Michael Koufman, director of Studies for Russia in CNA, a US-based institute, said on Twitter on February 27th.

The lack of accurate information and cheering teams in state media and parliament echoing its strange descriptions of the situation in Ukraine may have influenced Putin's ability to assess the situation in Ukraine and effectively plan the invasion.

“He tried to perform a brief operation in the hope that the Ukrainian side would collapse from the highest leadership in soldiers on the battlefield. It is possible that the madman was seriously counting on maintaining psychological and moral advantage,” Maxim Trudolyubov, wrote on a blog published by the US-based Kennan Institute on 27 February.

Putin “refused to understand that all this “priority” was dreamed of by its television channels.

For many years, his television and press have had a client and a real viewer himself, Putin wrote Trudolyubov.

“He was poisoned by his lies”, he said. / REL