How crazed despot Putin escaped collapsing Soviet Union with just a washing machine – and has vowed revenge ever since
WILD-EYED and raging, Vladimir Putin’s unhinged address to the world revealed he had succumbed to despotic madness.
Gone was the shrewd geopolitical operator of old as on Monday he made his intentions clear with an obsessional rant about Ukraine.
Rabidly insecure, he told the West: “You didn’t want us to be friends but you didn’t have to make an enemy of us.”
After two decades of possessing the powers of a Russian czar, he had become one.
Anyone doubting how absolute power has corrupted Putin need only witness his withering put-down of his spy chief that day.
At a Russian security council meeting to decide the fate of Ukraine, Sergey Naryshkin dared stray from the script of rubber-stamping “independence” for the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin repeatedly interrupted the head of the SVR foreign intelligence service before telling him “speak plainly!”
Stammering, apparently in sheer terror, Naryshkin fell into line.
The world now knew Putin was an absolute ruler whose closest aides were too terrified to argue.
Ludicrously, in the build-up to war, he had meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and German leader Olaf Scholz seated at the other end of a giant table.
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It did nothing to reassure a watching world that Putin had a keen grip on his sanity.
For this is a man whose complex persona is built on perceived humiliations and grudges.
For many Putin watchers, the road to the bloodshed of Ukraine began in Dresden, East Germany, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Aged 38, KGB officer Putin returned from Germany to his native St Petersburg.
All he had to show for a 15-year spy career was £200 in savings.
The Soviet Empire would soon disintegrate. It was a personal and professional slight and he seems unable to live it down.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in a rat-infested Leningrad slum on October 7 1952, the only child of Vladimir and Mariya Putin who married aged 17.
His war veteran father was a Communist party member and foreman in a factory making subway trains.
Mariya — at times a lab cleaner, bakery worker and janitor — had survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad while her husband was away fighting.
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Putin wrote: “Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses.”
Putin’s two elder brothers died in infancy. “Miracle baby” Vladimir arrived when Mariya was 41.
The dilapidated housing block where the family lived was bleak.
His former school teacher Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich said: “There was no hot water, no bathtub. The toilet was horrendous. And it was so cold, awful.”
In First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait, published in 2000, Putin described the “hordes of rats” that infested the flats. He recalled how he had cornered a huge rat, which then “threw itself at me”.
“Now the rat was chasing me,” he wrote. “Luckily, I managed to slam the door shut in its nose.
“There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.”
Putin — slight for his age — often got into fights with other boys, so took up judo, reaching black belt.
He said in 2015: “Fifty years ago the Leningrad street taught me a rule: if a fight is inevitable you have to throw the first punch.”
Masha Gessen, author of The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin, says Putin’s parents spoiled their miracle child making him feel like a “king”.
He studied law at Leningrad State University then joined the KGB in 1975 working in counter espionage.
In 1983 he wed air hostess Lyudmila Putina and the two lived together in East Germany between 1985 and 1990. They doted on their daughters Mariya and Yekaterina.
Returning to the Soviet Union in 1990, he became an aide to St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who had once taught him law.
Following the disintegration of the USSR, Ukraine and other ex Soviet republics gained independence from Russia.
Putin described the USSR’s collapse as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) Century”.
In 1997 he became chief of the Federal Security Service — the main successor of the KGB.
On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin quit and named Putin as acting president.
He won presidential elections in 2000 and has maintained a vice-like grip on power since then, snuffing out all opposition.
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The ludicrous vanity of the man was illustrated by PR shots in 2009 of Putin topless and in shades riding a horse in Siberia.
In 2013 Putin and Lyudmila split after 30 years of marriage.
Lyudmila said: “Vladimir is completely submerged in his work”
Thin-lipped Putin has hauled a nation with a GDP the size of Italy back towards superpower status with a string of military adventures.
He sent in troops to claim slices of Georgia in 2008 and seized Crimea and fomented separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
He propped up the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and unleashed agents with poison Novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
Now — in the words of Defence Secretary Ben Wallace — Putin has gone “full tonto”.
Hellbent on ransacking democratic Ukraine, the once-bullied boy is now a crazed despot.
Putin's Kremlin cronies — Sergei Lavrov
HARDMAN Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov mocked Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, comparing their conversation to “talking to a deaf person”.
Sergei Naryshkin
RUSSIA’S spy chief Sergei Naryshkin was interrupted repeatedly by Putin at a security meeting and told to “speak plainly!” in a slight that went global.
Dmitry Medvedev
PUTIN “yes man” Dmitry Medvedev is deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council. A former president and PM of Russia, he is a fan of British rock group Deep Purple.
Valery Gerasimov
General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff, highest ranking officer of Russia’s Armed Forces and veteran of the 10-year Chechen war.
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Valentina Matviyenko
UKRAINE-born Valentina Matviyenko is the only female member of Russia’s powerful Security Council. She has been put under sanctions by the US and EU.
Mikhail Mishustin
PM Mikhail Mishustin looked uncomfortable as Putin asked him to agree Ukrainian statelets Donetsk and Luhansk be recognised as independent.
Q&A
By Alan Mendoza, Henry Jackson Society think tank
Q. WHY has Putin done this?
A. He doesn’t believe Ukraine should be an independent nation and thinks it should be part of a greater Russia. He is paranoid Ukraine is getting too close to the West.
Q. Where is he likely to stop?
A. Reports suggest Putin wants to defeat the government and leave a puppet regime in place he will assist militarily.
Q. Will UK troops be involved?
A. Not at this stage. But we have sent troops to Nato allies in Eastern Europe. There is a fear Putin’s ambitions will not cease at Ukraine’s borders.
Q. What if he invades a Nato member state?
A. Article 5 would be invoked, which states an attack on one is treated as an attack on all. The UK would be expected to participate with our forces.
Q. Could this turn into WW3?
A. Unlikely, because Putin has never indicated a desire to take on the West militarily. However, if it is correct that he has become unhinged, anything is possible. He might be seeking a clash of civilisations to determine the world’s future.
Q. Is there any danger Putin could use nuclear weapons?
A. Unlikely. However, if the Ukrainian war goes badly, who knows where a mad dictator’s whims might take him? There was a dark hint in his latest speech that anyone trying to stop him would reap “consequences you have never encountered in your history”.
Q. What can the West do?
A. The strictest economic, diplomatic and political sanctions. Maybe banning Russia from the SWIFT banking system, sanctioning regime-linked oligarchs in London and the expulsion of Russian diplomats.