Here’s an article stating the contrary:
I’m not sure why that’s the ‘contrary’. It’s saying the same thing that everyone who’s dealt with Putin is saying.
Not that he has a clinical condition… yet… but that he’s changed and gone mentally downhill.
From the same article:
Condoleezza Rice, who met a number of times with Putin as secretary of state in the administration of President George W. Bush, said Sunday on Fox News that she, too, sees a different Putin.
He was always a “calculating and cold” former KGB operative, she said, but today, “he seems erratic.”
“There is an ever-deepening, delusional rendering of history,” she said. “It was always a kind of victimology of what had happened to them, but now it goes back to blaming Lenin for the foundation of Kyiv in Ukraine. So he’s descending into something that I personally haven’t seen before.”
‘Old man in a hurry’: he recognises that he hasn’t much time to cement a historical legacy (maybe he’s physically ill and knows it?), hence the over-ambition and consequent increased frustration, because at some level he realises the west isn’t ever going to take him at his own estimation.
I note he is now older than Yeltsin was when he retired.
Yeltsin was a few months short of turning 69. Putin turned 69 in October.
Interesting article from September last year.
tl;dr
Slow cognitive reactions. Convulsive leg movements. Swinging one arm and not the other while walking. Neurological symptoms have become more pronounced over time. Parkinson’s? Spinal injury or spinal cancer? Oncological drugs? Painkillers?
And that’s in Russian years. A Russian 69 is at least an American 85.
Novichok exposure?
Plug. Glug. Glug. Glug. I don’t think you should be comparing Yeltsin to Putin. He was the wests drunken useful idiot, the same way Boris Johnson (and I still reckon Trump, who lies about everything, so why not alcoholism?) is Putins.
Oddly I do believe him on this one, just because of his ego and the way he treated his brother.
I wouldn’t believe the man if he told me it was raining, he seems to enjoy lying, and even getting caught lying. How he treated his brother, well, I regard that as how he’d treat anybody he regarded as a “mark” and a mark he was, given the eldest son status…
I understand why people aren’t willing to accept that idea, and I don’t want to take the thread off topic on it, I’ll just state what I think and leave it at that.
I don’t think he’s always been an alcoholic. I don’t think he’s always been teetotal either, but can imagine he was for a time, very likely a long time. Alcoholism is a serious pit to fall into when you have money. However, the long rambling speeches in recent years screamed “he’s drunk” to me, and see above for my opinion on whether he ever tells the truth…
Or it could be… getting older. He is 75. Biden make a gaffe today, mixing up Ukraine and Iran. You think he is a drunk?
That wasn’t Biden mixing up Ukraine and Iran. That’s him having trouble with his speaking style, which isn’t helped by his having to control his stutter.
I’m tired of people jumping on most verbal gaffes of politicians, no matter who they are. The only exception I make is Trump, because of his tendency to double down and insist that whatever he said or wrote was exactly what he intended and we’re all idiots for not understanding him. What made “covfefe” so terrible, for instance, wasn’t that he wrote it–lots of us have had issues with text entry on a phone and have accidentally sent something nonsensical–but that he himself kept it alive as a thing.
Of all things, you chose “covfefe”? Where he was obviously being tongue in cheek?
When people tell you who they are, listen to them.
For decades, Putin has been saying that NATO is a hostile alliance aimed directly at Russia. He’s been saying that NATO expansion east of Germany is in direct and deliberate violation of a solemn agreement made during the talks on German unification in 1990, and is an overtly hostile military move intended to threaten and weaken Russia. He’s been saying that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a true red-line for Russia, an existential threat, that Russia cannot allow.
And then, after Putin repeatedly meddled in Ukrainian politics, launched cyber-attacks, staged limited military interventions and a limited invasion in the Donbas region, and outright seized Crimea, after all of that, when Ukraine’s drift towards the EU and NATO only accelerated, Putin stages a full-scale invasion.
And people are shocked - shocked! - that after decades of very loudly and publicly saying that Ukraine’s status is an existential matter of Russian national sovereignty and security, Putin acts like it’s an existential matter Russian national sovereignty and security.
This all seemed so self-evidently ridiculous to outside observers that many of them of them convinced themselves that Putin was just posturing, that he couldn’t really mean it, so when they’re finally hit in the face with Putin walking the the walk instead of just talking the talk, many of them decide that it wasn’t that they were oblivious to what Putin had been saying all along, it’s that Putin must have mentally deteriorated.
Yes, and no. Biden is getting old, but he’s not that much older than Trump. But I’m pretty sure Biden didn’t have a long rant about cancer windmills and being able to create a covid vaccine personally from a sharpie and some disinfectant…
That’s the drunken rant. Not getting a few words wrong.
Lots of people say all kinds of stuff. It’s doing that matters. “I’m going to kill him” has been uttered in anger a million times that never went any further. The fact that Putin does what he says, breaking every rule and implementing untold suffering, fits quite nicely with most people’s idea of mental deterioration. Even if it happened decades ago.
From the OP:
@Toxylon, if you want to argue that Putin has always been mentally unbalanced, that’s another argument. The OP posited a recent mental deterioration, a dramatic shift within the last couple of years. I personally just don’t see that. At all. Putin is behaving exactly the same way he’s always behaved.
Yeah, I mainly agree with your points here and in previous posts. I don’t think any of this should come as a great surprise, nor does it show mental instability, at least not recent mental instability. I think Putin made some bad calculations, but even there I think most observers could say that the west responses, especially in Europe, have been more than a bit surprising. Putin obviously made a calculation that the west would roll over and let this pass, but that wasn’t because Putin was or is crazy or has mentally deteriorated, it’s because that’s been the pattern in the past. But his current adventure is really just an extension of both previous actions and previous statements he’s been making all along.
The invasion of Ukraine is entirely consistent with past behavior.
The hiding away at the end of long tables - not so much.
There’s another angle that’s just occurred to me (and it’s disturbing). For all his grand scale rhetoric about security architectures and the like, he could also be bugged by the events in Lithuania in 1991:
Not Gorbachev’s finest hour, from anyone’s p.o v., but from Putin’s there must be an element of “This time, we’ll do it properly”.
Which is not comforting.