Putin: mad, delusional - or just bored?

Vyacheslav, an inmate on Russia’s death row, killed two women because he was bored. Photo by Andras Fekete.

Several readers - and friends - have asked me over the last several days whether I think Vladimir Putin is mad or delusional. Here I have tried to guess at the unknowable and get inside the head of the Russian leader.

During the nail-biting lead-up to the attack on Ukraine - which would have been almost Hollywoodesque had it not been so consequential - there was one question on everyone's lips.

Will Putin invade?

Many pundits were alarmingly cocksure: the man in the Kremlin was just bluffing. A full-scale Russian invasion was as likely as, for example, the precipitous fall of Kabul to the Taliban late last summer.

In front of televisions and on bar stools throughout the western world you could perhaps forgive a punter for following the opinion-formers. Their argument, after all, appeared to make sense.

"I was busy telling [my husband] that the Russians wouldn’t possibly invade. That Putin was having a muscle flex and a laugh at us all bleating," a friend wrote to me yesterday. "But I think I’m going to have to eat my words."

Now that the invasion has happened a new question is emerging amid the debris of Ukraine's largest cities. What on earth is going on in Putin's mind? Is he mad - or just delusional?

First of all, it is worth going back a couple of months. In weighing up whether to invade Ukraine, Putin - his view not mine - had some good reasons to send in the tanks.

He genuinely seems to have believed that Nato was preparing to admit Ukraine as a member, and then station Russia-facing rockets on its territory, something that the rest of us knew was somewhere between decades away and never.

Secondly the timing seemed auspicious. Biden looked weak and fumbling, especially after the debacle in Afghanistan,  Germany was divided with a fragile new coalition government, and the EU was, as so often, at loggerheads with itself. The UK, meanwhile, was in a stew over the Prime Minister's social life.

Thirdly he had done it before. In Chechnya, northern Syria, and eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia made ordnance-heavy military interventions that had pulverised its opponents and won the day. Putin, then, had a record of waging and winning wars.

But perhaps the overwhelming imperative, I speculate, was that Putin - who has always complained about Russia's loss of influence after the end of the Cold War - was fixated on legacy. Now that he was a Tsar, with more riches and power than he ever could have imagined , how could he ensure that the history books gave him his due?

"He has always been arrogant," a political leader in eastern Europe who has met Putin several times told me last week over dinner.

Putin must, of course, have known there were risks. He would have expected economic repercussions for Russia - though almost certainly failed to predict their extent. (Who in the West, after all, would have guessed that the largest companies in the world would effectively pull out of Russia and that we would be seriously discussing a full oil embargo?)

Then there was the uncertainty of the outcome of the war, any war. But on this point Putin seems to have allowed himself to be persuaded - even wanted to be persuaded - that many Ukrainians would treat his troops not as invaders but as liberators. When some of Putin's closest confidants - and Russia's most predacious hawks - began to suggest caution, he humiliated them on national television.

Finally, and most compelling as a counter argument, why take the chance?

After 22 years in power, Putin was sitting comfortably in the Kremlin, a steady leader who had delivered his people from the punishing helter-skelter of robber capitalism in the 1990s and given them a modicum of both stability and pride.

He must have known that if he waged war on a country of 45 million brother Slavs the outcome could not be certain. He will also have guessed that to start such a war, lose it and still keep his job, liberty and life would be even less certain.

So why did he do it?

After four years in Moscow and more than two decades of Russia-watching, this is my take. I have never believed that Putin was a chess grandmaster. While his apologists in the West lauded his acumen I have always seen him as an improvisor, like most of us.

In the terms of his favourite sport - judo - he prepares for combat, studies his opponent, and considers various eventualities. But he does not, cannot, map out the entire fight. Furthermore we have seen him hesitate and procrastinate again and again.

In the case of the jailing of the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2004 - the point that more than any other marked the beginning of Putin's slide from democrat to autocrat - there is much anecdotal evidence that he vacillated for months even as hardliners begged him to act.

Before seizing Crimea in 2014, he put all his pieces in place and then waited and waited before giving the fateful order.

My personal belief - and here I am going out on a limb - is that Putin was still undecided on Ukraine until fairly late on. He had good reason, after all, to think that he might get something for nothing.

The last time he marched his troops to the Ukrainian border - nearly a year ago - he was rewarded with a gratifying one-on-one with Biden in Geneva.

If he did it again, then, the Americans and the Europeans would surely give him something to take home. Guaranteed neutrality for Ukraine, perhaps, or maybe even a commitment to draw down Nato forces in the east.

But they didn't. In its lumbering supertanker-like way the West, which had caved to pressure so many times before from Moscow, stood firm. In fact, chivvied along by a surprisingly deft Biden administration - who could have predicted that? - it stiffened its collective backbone.

Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Putin was in a trap of his own making. He could either take his soldiers home with nothing to show for it, and admit that the gamble had failed, or go for broke, like a poker player who throws good money after bad.

And that is where the delusions that had, over the years, silted up his mental decision-making machinery began to tell. Surely there was no way that the Ukrainians - corrupt, inept and with a second-rate army - could resist the forces of the Motherland.

And surely the effete and homophilic West was not going to offer any muscular resistance.

For all their talk western capitals had been only too willing to look the other way in the past and, after a fit of complaints, would probably do so again.

And it was in these calculations - skewed by years of listening to mealy-mouthed courtiers, isolation and the drip-drip corruption of power - that Putin showed his delusion.

In his head Ukrainians were either morally flabby or Fascists. The West was suffocating in the straightjacket of its internecine doctrinal wars. And a tough and determined tactician could always face down a weak-willed crowd - much as he had faced down east German protestors outside the KGB headquarters in Dresden in 1989.

"Everything is going according to plan," Putin said last week on Russian television when talking about the invasion of Ukraine.

So - is this madness or delusion? There is another even more painful possibility.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was working as a correspondent in Moscow, I finagled my way into a Russian maximum security prison. All the inmates were on death row, although a moratorium had been imposed on executions.

I met a 46-year-old balding man with a squint and wire-rimmed glasses man called Vyacheslav. During the dying days of the Soviet Union he had been a young prosecutor in the Smolensk region of Russia and, by his own admission, had almost God-like powers over the locals.

One day, overcome with ennui, he stabbed to death two women he barely knew because he wanted to know how it felt.

"I took a knife, killed a book-keeper and a cashier and stole their money. I didn't need the money, but I needed to feel again. I was simply bored with my life."

I looked at him quizzically.

 "You've read Dostoyevsky," he said "Maybe you understand."

As a westerner I do not pretend to have a telling insight into the Russian soul. But the interview with Vyacheslav has stuck with me. And these days my thoughts have turned it to more than once.

"Putin is bored," a westerner who has had long-standing dealings with him told me three years ago.

And that was before the two years of ascetic isolation Putin imposed on himself during Covid.

Today Putin's contempt for human life is on garish display in the cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv.

That in itself is signature KGB. During the battle of Stalingrad, the NKVD - predecessors of the KGB - executed up to 10,000 of their own, pour encourgar les autres.

In any case he is probably capable of firing short-range tactical nuclear weapons into Ukrainian cities if he believes his job - or life - is on the line. He may even be willing to launch a strategic nuclear strike.

The Russian Army, most of which has now deployed in Ukraine, is being mauled, and it is difficult to imagine that it is in good shape to fight a conventional war against the west.

And so, as the ruble collapses, opposition to the war in Russia grows, we can expect to see more sabre rattling, but this time with nuclear weapons.

When Putin raised the readiness of his nuclear arsenal last week, he left it purposefully vague as to which level he was putting them at.

But having stiffed the pundits when he instructed his courtiers to tell us that he would not go into Ukraine, it would be a brave person - or a fool - who now predicted that Putin won't escalate further.

At that point whether he is mad, delusional or simply bored with life may not matter.

An excerpt from this article appeared on The Spectator website.

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