Having lost his Soviet-era KGB job in East Germany, the unemployed former lieutenant colonel embarked on a political career in his hometown of St. Petersburg. Moved to Moscow by his political godfather Anatoly Sobchak and subsequently named acting president on December 31, 1999 by Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin first ascended to the presidency of the Russian Federation on May 7, 2000. Initially, applying the time tested fallacious formula of his predecessors, he presented himself to the gullible American and European leaders as a young as well as a westernized politician whose only dream is to transform his country into a genuine democratic state. After having secured the economic and financial benefits of this historic Russian hoax from the West, he told his compatriots in his annual state of the nation address in April 2005: “…the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century.” However, not being satisfied with this short declaration, he continued thus: “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
To up the ante of his fabricated historical doctrine of Russian victimhood, Putin gave a speech on February 10, 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, in which, for the first time, he sharply criticized the United States of America’s global dominance and it’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.” This resurrection of the Cold War animosity proved that the centuries-old Russian inferiority complex remained politically as alive as the Tsarist-Communist attempts at bringing Russia closer to an Asiatic tyranny. The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty also went out of the window. In 2008, he invaded Georgia and took away Abkhazia and South-Ossetia. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and occupied the Donbas region. Simultaneously, Putin has embarked on methodically rebuilding the Russian military, including its nuclear modernization. Domestically, he has become a tyrant with unlimited powers. The legislature has turned into an automatic voting machine. The judiciary has been totally subordinated to his political objectives. The media has been brought under his absolute control. The economy was reprivatized by his own oligarchs. The stage was set for the reign of uncontrolled tyranny with the wholesale expulsion of reason from politics, the economy and Putin’s ability to resolve inherent conflicts rooted in the past as well as the present inside Russia and beyond. These seeds of future collapse of Putin’s tyrannical regime have been strengthened by the illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Almost all of the tragic catastrophes of history owe their birth to the deluded minds of tyrants with a destructive penchant for the establishment of made-up realities. President Putin is no exception. First, desiring to recreate the non-existent glory of the Tsarist as well as the Soviet empires, he has constructed a completely false reality. Accordingly, claiming that the 10th century Kyivan Rus is the real foundation of today’s Russia, he commissioned a statue of the first Kyivan prince Volodymyr in 2016, a clear sign of the pathological denial of the actual embrace of Christianity in the 10th century. A second mentally sick political fiction was his definition of the illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, terming the forced return of the peninsula “the revival of the Russian world” (in Russian: Russkiy Mir). Moreover, knowing that there are sufficient number of gullible Russians and even uneducated idiots within the Russian Federation, he reverted to the well-tested Russian ethno-racism branding the elected leaders of Ukraine neo-Nazis and even traitors to their country. Finally, having unleashed the greatest war since 1945 in Europe, he characterized the illegal invasion as a “special military operation” (in Russian: O provedenii specialnoy voennoy operacii). Having reduced his illegal war to a linguistic phenomenon, he successfully demonstrated his hatred for peace, stability and cooperation with the rest of the world. More importantly, he also showed his uncompromising longing for the re-Stalinization of Russia under his absolute authority.
Expectedly, President Putin’s psychopathic idiocy initially was met with the equally idiotic Western response of blaming themselves for the unsuccessful integration of the Russian Federation into the new world order. This internationalization of “political correctness,” has only emboldened President Putin to prove the total failure of Western appeasement toward his outsized ambitions. Predictably, regional violence and attempted global criminality on the part of the Russian Federation have increased as well as multiplied. Russians in general and Russian soldiers in particular have been told that they are exceptional and, therefore, so much better than everybody else. Adding insult to injury, they have also been inculcated with the belief that they should show no empathy to the non-Russians, because they are inherently good and their terrorism is only triggered by their non- Russian enemies.
To fully grasp President Putin’s delusional psychopathy for bringing about a new era of Russian domination, it is sufficient to look at his conduct of the war with Ukraine. What started out as a military Blitzkrieg has turned into a genocidal all-out annihilation of the sovereign state of Ukraine and its people. By now, however, it is becoming crystal clear that this delusional man has committed a catastrophic blunder. Russian colonialism is not coming to Ukraine or elsewhere. What will visit the Russian Federation is the inevitable collapse of President Putin’s tyrannical regime.
In conclusion, Russians must not ask the question: “Who did this catastrophe to us?” Rather they should ask: “What have we been doing wrong to always end up in hopeless misery?” The answer should be unequivocal: Russia must become a normal country and not the prey of psychopathic leaders or unconscionable gamblers.