Excerpt – Stories from People Who’ve Met Him.
Putin has a view of the world that is fundamentally unlike that of most Americans.
He’s an authoritarian leader in a country where state media controls the narrative, and he’s habitually thumbed his nose at the concerns of the rest of the world while plowing ahead with this invasion that’s led many to label him as a war criminal.
The director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London told The Los Angeles Time:
“The difficulty that I’m having analytically is that I don’t know how I would be able to distinguish between a Putin who is crazy and a Putin who just understands the world in a very different way than I do,”
So what is Putin like, really?
His inner circle is tight, but here’s what we can gather from people who know him or have met him and have spoken out about the experience.
Putin is evil
Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. He’s also worked for the U.S. National Security Council as the senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs, and he’s currently a political science professor at Stanford and a columnist for the Washington Post.
Having written more than 20 academic articles that directly reference Putin, McFaul is intimately familiar with studying the Russian president, and he even had a personal interaction with him in 1991.
“We have been two slow to realize and understand [Putin’s] evilness,” McFaul said. “I wrote a column for the Washington Post a couple of years ago saying that he was evil in response to what he did — to try to kill the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.
And I was flooded with hate mail from America saying, ‘How dare you call this leader evil?’ So I think the first thing we need to do is understand who he is.
He doesn’t care about lives, he’s made that clear. This is his fifth war, not his first. And that when he says crazy things, we need to listen to him carefully.”
“One important thing people need to understand is that the more exposed you are to sanctions, the less influence you have with Putin back home,” McFaul said.
Putin’s inner circle is “like The Godfather“
Alexandra Tolstoy, the former partner of Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev, who was once known as “Putin’s banker” but left the Kremlin in 2011 has some words to say.
For the eight years the couple was together, Tolstoy got an insider’s perspective into Putin, his closest allies, and how they operate — and it’s a grim picture.
“It was sort of like everything you probably imagine, like The Godfather,” Tolstoy told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “This crazy insane wealth, and also a complete lack of normal, human morals.
And like any dictator, he rules through divide and rule, so [his advisors] all hate each other. They’re all very competitive. They don’t trust each other, and it’s ruthless.”
Tolstoy added that she thinks Putin “has probably got narcissistic personality disorder,” and she said she’s witnessed from afar a change in the man she once knew.
