The bizarre behaviour
of President Vladimir Putin continues to astound analysts across the Western
world. It could be just the way this enigmatic narcissist wants it to be.
Most ‘normal’ people in Portugal and elsewhere
are sceptical of the political elite. They distrust them. Putin is currently
top of the heap.
The centre-right president
and centre-left prime minister of Portugal, which is internationally rated as one
the five most peaceful countries in the world, may not be totally admired by
all Portuguese voters, but at least they
are considered to be sound of mind. Putin on the other hand is widely perceived
to be anything but.
While not openly commenting on Putin’s psychological
condition, Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa has vehemently condemned
Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, many psychologists
and investigative journalists using open source materials have concluded that
Putin is probably a psychopath. The presence of a psychopath in any community is worrying at the best of times, but one with
so much power and global influence as Putin is of course exceptionally
dangerous.
Many of the
personality characteristics of a psychopath are observable and they include a
grandiose sense of self-esteem, an uncontrollable tendency to commit violent activities,
a compulsive need to tell lies and antipathy to love and a lack of remorse or
shame. Psychopaths are often highly intelligent,
but usually have poor judgement and a failure to learn from experience.
In Putin’s case as
in many others, it probably all started with a very traumatic childhood. He was
born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1952. An estimated 800,000 people in
the city had been killed during the 900-day Nazi siege in World War ll. Putin’s
father was severely wounded while serving in the Russian army. His mother
almost died of starvation. The couple lost two children before Vladimir’s
birth.
According to
reliable sources such as The Atlantic
news magazine, his family lived in a single
room in a rundown apartment with two other families. As his mother and father worked
hard just to survive, it’s thought their small son went without proper parental
care, sufficient food, emotional warmth, respect and kindness. He had few friends
and was bullied by neighbouring thugs whom he learned to viciously defend
himself against.
He grew up to be an
intelligent lad, did well at high school and went on to get a university law
degree. But the damage to his mind had probably already been done and was irreversible.
A great many people
in Portugal, Ukraine, Russia and perhaps every other country in the world have
mental health problems that are not nearly as severe as psychopathy and are
treatable medically and with compassion. Unfortunately, in extreme psychopathic
cases this is difficult because egocentricity, rigid pathological defence
mechanisms and other harsh factors will not allow it. That does not mean
psychopaths do not deserve support. But nor does it mean that acts of violence
by them should be justified.
While serving with
the KGB, Putin’s career had produced “a macho, distrustful, unpredictable, cultivator
of half-truths and disinformation who remains culturally and psychologically
tied to a Soviet Union that no longer exists,” according to a source quoted in
the American journal Foreign Policy.
Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of
state from 1997 to 2001, met Putin as the newly appointed acting president of
Russia in 2000. In an article in the New
York Times last month she recalled: “Putin spoke unemotionally and without
notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen
rebels. Flying home, I recorded my recollections. ‘Putin is small and pale,’ I
wrote, ‘so cold as to be almost reptilian’.”
The former
president of Latvia, Vaira-Freiberga, a teacher-scholar in Canada with a PhD degree in psychology, says that Putin has become “unhinged”, adding that invading Ukraine “was not the
actions of a sane man interested in the welfare of his country.” In an
interview with Global News, part of
the Canadian Global TV network, she variously described Putin as “a narcissist
and a psychopath, with no conscience whatsoever. And he is a megalomaniac. He
is definitely megalomaniac with very strong paranoid tendencies.”
Putin’s decision to launch his brutal invasion of Ukraine has made many
other Western observers question the mental state of the man in charge of the
world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Foreign Policy has noted that those who have followed the Russian
leader’s behaviour closely over the years have been struck by the bizarre and
dark nature of his recent speeches in which he described Ukrainian leaders
as a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security who previously worked as a senior Russia analyst at the CIA, has
said that given the implications for the world, the U.S. intelligence community
has teams of people, including doctors and psychologists working at the CIA’s
secretive Medical and Psychological Analysis Center, devoted to analyzing the
physical and mental health of authoritarian leaders, including Putin. “They use
a variety of methods, including scrutinizing speeches and body language, to
detect subtle shifts,” she told FP.
Charles Morgan, a forensic psychiatrist who previously worked for the
CIA, told the magazine. “Although the science of indirect
assessments is young at this stage, it seems to be true [that] a person’s past
behavior is a more reliable indicator of how they will behave in the future
than what they say they will do in the future.”
An article in the The Spectator in the
UK said that “sitting at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned
behind a vast table in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin’s idea of social
distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His
distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little
more than 48 hours, Putin’s sensible, peace-talking statesman had flipped into
something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters.”
John Sipher, a former senior member of the CIA’s Clandestine Service who
served in Russia, has said that getting information from a leader’s inner
circle in countries like Russia and China, which are regarded as “hard targets”
by intelligence agencies, can be especially tricky.“Sources don’t grow on
trees, and it’s especially difficult in a place like that. The rest of us are
left to pour over Putin’s speeches and acts as the world wants to see what his
next move may be.”
