Putin won’t just stop with Ukraine, there’s no doubt he will target other countries if he’s successful
RUSSIA’S war on Ukraine approaches its first anniversary on February 24 and it appears no closer to ending.
A top Irish-based clinical psychologist has said it is an “almost certainty” that power-mad Vladimir Putin, will target more of Eastern Europe if he succeeds in taking control of Ukraine.
Ian Robertson, Professor of Psychology at Trinity College and a founding director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, has written about the effects power has on the brain and studied the Russian leader’s insatiable desire for control.
He says there is no doubt that Putin will set his sights on countries such as Poland and Latvia if he feels his current objectives in neighbouring Ukraine are being achieved.
Scottish-born Prof Robertson, who features in the 2018 documentary Putin: A New Tsar, currently showing on Netflix, explains why this is the case.
VLADIMIR PUTIN is not going to give up.
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He’s so ruthless, so determined to protect this course of action. There are too many variables at play at the moment. It’s a mess.
But it is an almost certainty that he won’t stop with the Ukraine if he feels his objections are being achieved.
It will whip up a huge sense of national fervour that he will want more.
He will definitely target countries such as Poland or Latvia next if he wins this war.
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That’s why the West needs to hold a very firm line and I was delighted to see Nato pledge more arms and aid to Ukraine.
Putin grew up in the slums of St Petersburg and had a very average childhood.
He even drove a taxi in St Petersburg for a period in the early 1990s after being disillusioned by the break-up of the Soviet Union and being against the coup against Gorbachev.
After joining the KGB in 1975 he had a fairly low-level job but he was a big believer in Soviet politics and we are seeing that a lot now. When he joined the Yeltsin administration, he never had a big personality and people kept giving him little bits of power because he was never seen as a threat. But he was very clever, very manipulative and very lucky.
Millions of people have the same kind of talent that Putin has but never had the luck that came his way. His is 90 per cent luck and ten per cent talent, like many people who get to top jobs.
Once he got that little bit of power he had a taste for it and kept wanting more. In the KGB you are taught that the end justifies the means — and he never lost that ruthlessness.
He is as power hungry now as he has ever been. Napoloeon, Hitler, Gaddafi all had it and now Putin has it.
Putin served in East Germany, where everything in the KGB was about control and surveillance.
He controls the television, the newspapers. The Russian people living in Russia have no access to independent or international media so they don’t know how his actions are perceived around the world or what he is doing.
People are banned from thinking.
What we saw last year was a further deterioration in Putin’s character and judgment following his two years of extraordinary isolation because of his fear of catching Covid.
This fear may be genuine if, for example, his immune response is weakened.
Putin’s changing contours on his face resembles that of a man on high dosages of steroids, which can reduce immunity.
Paranoia and fear
Perhaps a better explanation than the more frequent ones of failed plastic surgery or Botox injections.
But power is as potent a brain-changer as any drug and Putin is in a dangerous mental state because of this.
His brain has been fuelled by so much power that he is now riddled with paranoia and fear. He sees what happens with the break-up of the Soviet Union as the great humiliation of Russia and he wants people to pay.
He thinks he’s morally justified in what he is doing and he does not care how many Ukrainians he kills or how many hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers die along the way. He will not stop.
He knows so much of the West are reliant on Russian gas. He funded Brexit and has made so many oligarchs in the UK very wealthy, so Putin basically funded the Tory party.
He’s a close friend of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and had a bit of a cosy relationship with Donald Trump.
He even has support from some quarters in Ireland.
Putin has manipulated elections in many countries for his own means.
We’re seeing now with the disaster in the Ukraine what he has always been capable of and it’s impossible to tell where it will end.
But he’ is nowhere near finished.
l Professor Robertson is the author of the 2012 book The Winner Effect: How Power Affects Your Brain and last year published his latest work How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief, in which he uses Putin as a case study.
Earlier this year he also wrote a blog, Inside Putin’s Mind: Absolute Power has Blinded the New Czar.
