Donald Trump famously invited TV cameras to watch his cabinet secretaries say what an honor it will be to serve him, the country be damned. Vladimir Putin showed his former puppet yesterday that real strongmen instill fear more than finagle flattery. He invited TV cameras to watch his spy chief and other national security advisers parrot support for his recognition of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.
Except that his spy chief said he (will) support this recognition, instead of saying he supports it. This unwitting hesitation moved Putin to berate him to “speak plainly, Sergei.” But he came across like an exasperated parent chiding a 3-year-old child who keeps reciting numbers when asked to recite the alphabet.
Only this then made the spy chief so nervous that he blurted out Putin’s “secret” plan to annex these provinces into his Russian Federation. This, pursuant to the putinization of former Soviet satellite countries, which saw his de facto annexation of the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 and formal annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014.
I coined that term way back in 2005 to describe and predict Putin’s plan to exert neo-Soviet sphere of influence over those countries – as I did in “The Putinization of Russia extends to Georgia,” November 2, 2006.
In any event, a proud Putin chuckled at the way he showed the world how even this most powerful member of his cabinet quivers in fear before him. The spy chief finally managed to clarify his pledge of unconditional support. But then Putin punctuated his contempt for him and the rest of them by dismissing this hapless man with a “Good. Please sit down. Thank you.”
Fear of assassination
The irony is that this performance only reinforced growing suspicion that Putin has become the cliched dictator who has lost his friggin’ mind. Granted, that one-hour tirade, which President Biden decried as a “twisted rewrite of history” to provide a pretext to invade Ukraine, had already erased all doubt in this respect.
But only a Putin gone mad would revel in publicly humiliating his national security advisors while living in constant fear that there might be a Russian Claus von Stauffenberg conspiring among them to kill him. I ridiculed the extent to which Putin is going to assassin proof his life just days ago in “The Plot to Kill Vladimir Putin,” February 19, 2022.
Sanctions
No doubt you’ve heard Biden leading Western leaders in warning Putin about imposing the “mother of all sanctions” if he continues his Russian invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, they hope prescribing a little of Putin’s own medicine, namely instilling fear over losing access to international banking and travel, will proscribe his actions.
The problem is that Putin clearly feels inoculated. Indeed, reports are that he spent the past eight years building up financial reserves to weather Western sanctions.
What’s more, it is an open secret that he resents Russian oligarchs spending more time in New York, London, and Paris than they do in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi. Ironically, this might be because, for over 20 years, he hasn’t been able to travel outside Russia unless invited by another head of state.
Except that, for much of this time, he has been such a pariah on the world stage, the only ones he could get to do so have been leaders of “shithole countries” in Africa. This is why Russia has become his gilded cage.
More to the point, he clearly thinks his oligarchs should not be caged with him. And, ominously, he probably thinks being stuck there will imbue in them the us-against-the-world jingoism that now animates his daily life … and justifies Russia’s military aggression.
Bottom line
The irony of ironies is that performance yesterday showed Putin as an increasingly isolated madman; and one who had already given every member of his cabinet many reasons to assassinate him. And he just gave his spy chief a very personal reason to do so.
But invading Ukraine and triggering Western sanctions that deprive Russian oligarchs of their ability to enjoy their wealth, the way they all do throughout the West so ostentatiously, could spell his doom. Like I warned in my February 15 blog commentary, Putin had better beware the Ides of March.
Related commentaries:
Putinization… putinization of Georgia…
kill Putin… Ukraine… Ides of March…