Even before the Ukraine war, Intelligence agencies have developed psychological profiles of Vladimir Putin. Is the Ukraine invasion a sign that the Russian President is mentally unwell, or is this just another case of a dictator holding onto power for far too long with a distorted view of history and reality?
by Yossi Melman
Vladimir Putin – psychopath or rational leader teetering on the edge? That is the question on everyone’s lips these days. Everyone is trying to decipher the Russian president’s true intentions and ambitions in the war in Ukraine and to understand the mindset of the menacing leader who is threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Is Putin cut from the same cloth as absolute tyrants like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong? Even Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, is not sure how to answer that question. In a briefing for members of the House Intelligence Committee, she said last week that Putin’s state of mind is hard to gauge. Her statement shows a lot of modesty. It’s a shame that Israeli officials rarely display that trait.
Nonetheless, Haines, a lawyer who formerly served as deputy head of the CIA, does have the tools to make an assessment. One of these are the psychological profiles that intelligence agencies have developed over many years. Profiling of this kind has previously proven to be a highly effective forecasting tool, very useful in building assessments of people.
At the CIA, the founding father of this approach was Prof. Jerrold Post, a psychologist who passed away a few years ago. His disciple in Israel is Prof. Shaul Kimhi, who once wrote psychological profiles of many Arab leaders for the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence. At his own initiative, Kimhi also constructed a profile of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The army’s MI, the Mossad and the Ministry of Foreign Affair’s Center for Political Research have not bothered to compose a similar profile of Putin. They leave this task to their colleagues in the West: the CIA, Germany’s BND intelligence agency and Britain’s MI6. These agencies share information and provide reports to the research departments of MI and the Mossad as part of their extensive cooperation with one another.
Conversations with sources privy to this information give one the impression that Putin is not a psychopath, but a hard-core ideologue wrapped in layers of belligerence and extreme manipulation, as well as a tendency toward paranoia.
“His worldview is anchored in Russian history. It hinges on the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he sees as a historic tragedy,” one such source stresses. A conservative and Russian nationalist, Putin pines for restoration of the Old Order and its “spheres of influence,” an idea borrowed from the Cold War era, and for his homeland to regain its superpower status.
Like a meteor
The story of Vladimir Putin’s rise has certain admirable elements. He was born in 1952 in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to a family of modest means. He studied law, joined the Communist Party, enlisted in the KGB, became a foreign intelligence officer and was stationed in Dresden. After he had attained a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel, he watched the collapse of the Soviet Union from his post in East Germany.
When he returned to Russia, Putin was taken under the wing of Anatoly Sobchak, one of his law professors. Sobchak, the author of the Russian Federation’s new constitution and also mayor of Saint Petersburg, became Putin’s mentor. The jurist and high-ranking politician’s close bond with the younger intelligence officer created the impression that the latter believed in democratic values. That turned out to be a mistake: Above all, Putin was an ambitious opportunist.
In 1996, Putin moved to Moscow and became part of the circle that surrounded then-President Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin. His advancement was due in part to his unyielding loyalty to Sobchak, who meanwhile had become embroiled in a major corruption scandal in his city and fled to Paris. Yeltsin was impressed by Putin’s loyalty.
He appointed him to head his presidential team, and later director of the Federal Security Service. In 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister, and at the end of the year, Yeltsin named him his successor. His rise was meteoric by any standard, particularly in a country like Russia.
“At the start of his path to the top, as someone who came from a poor family, money was something that greatly interested him,” a former senior British intelligence official told me. “Later on, when he became wealthy and entrenched his rule, money became for him a means of achieving power and control. That is what interests and motivates him today.”
This was evident in two spheres. The first was in his efforts to boost the economic status of his family – his wife Lyudmila Putina, whom he divorced in 2013, his two daughters who live in Holland, and his mistresses (one of them, his former housekeeper, lives in Monaco).
The second involved creating a separate class for the ruling elite in Russia, oligarchs who were molded in a similar way to him, most of them former KGB and Russian military men who bowed to his authority. In return for their loyalty, he let them amass vast wealth and assets inside and outside Russia.
“From this perspective, he is like the Godfather. He’s more of a mafia don than a head of state,” says Financial Times reporter Tom Burgis, author of the book “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World.”
Cold eye, cold soul
To better understand Putin’s intentions and moves today, one has to go back to the 1990s and to Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declarations of independence of the new republics, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former general in the Soviet air force, declared the independence of the Republic of Ichekeria and ruled it.
Yeltsin tried to put down the rebellion but used force sparingly out of concern for how the world would react. The result was a ringing Russian defeat in the war in Chechnya, where Dudayev became president in 1991.
When appointed prime minister, and particularly after he was elected president in 2000, Putin adopted the opposite strategy. He launched a second war in Chechnya, this time merciless and with no holds barred. He prevented Russian and international media from covering the fighting and the aerial bombardments and ground offensives that reduced Grozny to rubble. “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. Whether it’s at the airport or in bathrooms. We will kill them everywhere,” Putin said in 1999.
After the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Putin was the first world leader to phone U.S. President George W. Bush to express solidarity with the American people and offer assistance. He clearly thought the attacks presented an opportunity for a turning point in relations between the two superpowers, and Bush thought so too, viewing Putin as a partner in the war on terror. “I looked into his eyes and I saw his soul,” was one of Bush’s memorable statements from that time.
But Putin never shared the Western-democratic values. “Putin changed over the years,” said an Israeli diplomat who was present at several meetings between Israeli leaders and the Russian president in the last decade or so. He added that Putin evolved from being a modest and somewhat insecure leader who listened very closely to Israeli figures including Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres into a self-confident leader who did not hesitate to get angry at or berate his guests. “When Peres mentioned Vladimir Gusinsky (a Russian oligarch who had fallen out of Putin’s favor), Putin turned red and could barely control himself,” the diplomat added.
A former CIA official who became well acquainted with the “Putin file” in the course of his career believes that the Russian president consciously created an image of being a pragmatic, cool-headed, calculating leader who weighs his moves very carefully. However, the official said, this image began to evaporate over time and was supplanted by a growing tendency toward adventurism and risk-taking. Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, his incursions into eastern Ukraine and conquest of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, as well as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that’s happening now – all can be seen in this context.
Viruses, or worse
It is possible that the pandemic has also contributed to changes in Putin. Rumors about his shaky health have no corroboration. Quite the opposite. Putin, who will turn 70 this year, maintains an athletic lifestyle, adheres to a strict diet and does not drink vodka.
He only sips wine when required at official events. At the same time, since the start of the pandemic, he has exhibited signs of hypochondria and paranoia. Anyone who wants meet with him, including his ministers and army commanders, must first take a PCR test. Such gatherings in his office are conducted without handshakes, are generally kept brief, and lately have also been held with Putin sitting at the end of a very long table, far from everyone else.
Some analysts say the use of the long table is due to Putin’s fear of an assassination attempt. Others even go so far as to say that he is using a double, as Saddam Hussein did. A former British intelligence official who was privy to the information on Putin, dismisses the latter claim.
“He is someone to whom honor is very important. It’s inconceivable that he would use a double,” he said, adding that he believes that Putin’s behavior lately is mostly due to his fear of contracting an illness. “The thing he’s afraid of is viruses.”
Whatever the reason for it, Putin’s isolation has clearly increased sharply in recent years. The war in Ukraine and the harsh sanctions imposed by the West certainly are not doing anything to alter this situation. Could this also be affecting his judgment? Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council and former Putin adviser, has admitted that he is struggling to comprehend the Russian president’s present motives.
“I’m depressed, I think many of us are depressed,” he said in a rare and bold interview with Sky News, last week. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has recently tweeted several statements implying that the Russian president’s mental state is unstable.
And what does Prof. Kimhi, the Israeli intelligence community’s profiler, have to say on this subject? He believes that, like any dictator who holds onto power for too long, Putin’s grasp of reality has slipped over the years – that it is being replaced by suspicion, contempt for others, an attitude that says, “I’m the only one who matters,” a distorted view of history and increasing self-righteousness.
The result of all this are rash decisions and strategic errors, as we are now witnessing with the invasion of Ukraine. Is Putin capable of recognizing his mistakes? Is he prepared to turn Kyiv into the next Grozny? Will he be willing to suffice with anything less than total victory? Will he seek to achieve that at any price? So far, even after his meeting this past Saturday with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, he has not shown any indication of a willingness to compromise and appears to be ready to go all-out to the end.
Putin’s isolation has clearly increased sharply in recent years. The war in Ukraine and the harsh sanctions imposed by the West certainly are not doing anything to alter this situation. Could this also be affecting his judgment?
( Yossi works for Haaretz in Israel where this piece first appeared)
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