The war in Ukraine is not about Putin’s mental health
Armchair psychology tells us nothing about the Russian invasion.
When it comes to making sense of what is happening in Ukraine, there’s one thing almost everyone seems to agree on: Vladimir Putin has gone mad. Boris Johnson got the ball rolling when he announced last week in the House of Commons that Putin was showing an ‘illogical and irrational frame of mind’. The next day, defence secretary Ben Wallace upped the ante and said Putin had ‘gone full tonto’. Former NATO secretary general Anders Rasmussen joined in, saying the Russian president may have ‘gone crazy’ and seemed ‘unhinged’ in his televised appearances. Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice added for good measure: ‘I am sure he’s not wholly rational. He’s a megalomaniac. And you have to deal with the five per cent chance that he might in fact be delusional.’
Commentators have been quick to join in with the armchair psychiatry. Russia is being led by ‘Vlad the Mad’, according to Douglas Murray in the New York Post. Putin’s a ‘mad bastard’, echoed Tony Parsons in the Sun. Forget the fog of war, some even suggest Putin is suffering from the ‘brain fog’ associated with Long Covid. Or that extended periods of Covid isolation may have fuelled ‘paranoia’ and a ‘bunker mentality’. Such long-distance diagnoses reveal far more about the affectations of the political class than they do about Putin’s state of mind.