Thanks for reviving this prescient portrait, Peter. Your insights into a sociopath in the making are chilling - and left me curious about his fragile sense of masculinity that seems to be at least one of the drivers of his rage, metastasizing into geopolitical violence again and again. Angela Merkel noted this tendency as well in the infamous photo opp where he brought out his huge dog to scare her and smirked as it circled her chair. Yet here he is, snuggling his poodle. Surely not an image he wants the world to see now. Make sure you engage a food taster...
Peter -- I remember the book very well. In it, the journalists asked him about RFE/RL reporter Andrei Babitsky, who was held incommunicado for a time by Russian forces because of his reporting on Chechnya. Putin made clear he considered Babitsky's journalism traitorous. "What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun." The Babitsky exchange was absolutely chilling and turned out to be quite prophetic.
Thanks for reviving this prescient portrait, Peter. Your insights into a sociopath in the making are chilling - and left me curious about his fragile sense of masculinity that seems to be at least one of the drivers of his rage, metastasizing into geopolitical violence again and again. Angela Merkel noted this tendency as well in the infamous photo opp where he brought out his huge dog to scare her and smirked as it circled her chair. Yet here he is, snuggling his poodle. Surely not an image he wants the world to see now. Make sure you engage a food taster...
Peter -- I remember the book very well. In it, the journalists asked him about RFE/RL reporter Andrei Babitsky, who was held incommunicado for a time by Russian forces because of his reporting on Chechnya. Putin made clear he considered Babitsky's journalism traitorous. "What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun." The Babitsky exchange was absolutely chilling and turned out to be quite prophetic.