Ich habe Putin in Moskau aus der Nähe gesehen. Er wird von Groll und Besessenheit getrieben

For a long time, it was believed that [Vladimir Putin](https://inews.co.uk/topic/vladimir-putin?srsltid=AfmBOorMTEtV9Lhs92c1FxiPoKRlZeS4xHVTn9BeKw-VxVuUqrdnY5C6&ico=in-line_link) had no ideology. A classic kleptocrat, the Russian President simply strived to maintain his power at all costs.

But a surrogate ideology, a kind of own-brand Make Russia Great Again, became useful to him, convincing the nation that it had been humiliated by the collapse of the great empire, and only he could turn it around. Putin proclaimed himself the bearer of genuine national traditional values and a fighter against the depraved West and its agents. But nothing more.

For him to continue ruling against a backdrop of absolute political apathy and the learned indifference of a population perfectly content with the low-hanging fruits of a market economy and high oil and gas prices, there was no [need to launch his “special military operation” in Ukraine](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/i-fled-russia-terrorised-know-how-putin-fall-4286611?ico=in-line_link).

The war is a consequence not only of Putin’s personal resentment toward the West (his personal psychology plays a significant role here), but above all, of his obsession with a national-imperial vision of the world and a just world order.

In other words, without Putin’s ideology of Russian exceptionalism, which declares imperial expansionism a defensive or even liberating battle against the absolute Western globalist evil, there would have been no war.

# Putin at the start of his rule

As a long-time journalist based in Moscow working for independent Russian media, I have observed Putin throughout the years and now decades of his rule. In the early years, his ideology of Russian messianism and resentment existed in a diffuse, latent, shadowy state.

Almost immediately after coming to power in 2000, Putin reinstated the Soviet anthem, which had been personally approved by Joseph Stalin and had been removed by Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. A few years later, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe”.

Shortly after the start of Putin’s “special operation” in [Ukraine](https://inews.co.uk/topic/ukraine?ico=in-line_link) in 2022, his ideology began to take on a codified, systematised form. As early as November of that year, a presidential decree was issued listing “Russian spiritual and moral traditional values”; “patriotic” subjects were introduced in schools; in 2023, the first mandatory “unified” history textbooks for schoolchildren and a “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” course for universities were written (see the Oscar-winning film *Mr Nobody against Putin*).

The Russian regime’s classic playbook of autocratic militarism. It has no alternative option outside war, and thus it continues to go this way.

This is why Putin’s deranged role is dangerous. He had r*ped Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, Myanmar, Syria, Georgia, Nicaragua, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso with lasting damages. He is, like Trump, a threat of humanity.

Putin is a cancer that must be removed not by offer, but by force.