Putin’s self-induced geopolitical psychosis

Olvasási idő: 7 perc.

Miklos K. Radvanyi, vice president of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute provided an analysis for Gulyáságyú Média. / Radványi Miklós, az egyesült államokbeli republikánus think-tank, a Frontiers of Freedom Institute alelnöke angol nyelvű elemzése a Gulyáságyú Média számára.

Nyitóképünkön: Vlagymir Putyin a Valdaj Nemzetközi Vitaklub 22. éves találkozójának plenáris ülésén 2025. október 2-án Szocsiban. Forrás: Grigorij Sziszojev, Rasszia Szivodnya, kremlin.ru..

Russia: naked expansionism or integration?

From time immemorial, domestic and foreign policies have always been closely interconnected in Russian history. Neither really has existed in isolation. Never fully civilized, at no time really part of the European continent and torn between the Scylla of unbridled territorial ambition as well as the Charybdis of megalomania of its slightly deranged tyrants, Russia has been faced repeatedly with the complex challenge of what foreign policy to pursue.

Should it follow naked expansionism by excessively militarizing the state or try to integrate Russia at least partially into the ever changing fabric of the continent? Notwithstanding Peter the Great’s feeble attempts at Westernization, Catherine the Great’s moves to position the Russian Empire geographically closer to the western part of Europe by seizing East Poland, and Stalin’s savage actions to occupy most of Central as well as Eastern Europe, Russia cum the Soviet Union, and again the post-1991 Russian Federation, have remained radically different in their antediluvian culture, primitive customs and barbaric identity from the West.

Today, Russia is fiercely hostile to NATO as well as the European Union because of President Putin’s repeated aggressions to reestablish the irredeemably dead Soviet Union.

Putin: the demise of the Soviet Union: „major humanitarian tragedy”

Born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had an unremarkable upbringing. After obtaining his law degree from the Leningrad State University and completing his advanced courses at the Andropov (KGB) Institute, he was sent to East Germany in 1985. Returning to Leningrad in 1990, he landed several jobs dealing with international relations in the local bureaucracy. In 1996, he moved to Moscow. Following several appointments in the Yeltsin administration, he was made Prime Minister in August 1999. Less than six months later on December 31, 1999, he became the Acting President of the Russian Federation.

As a result of the presidential election on March 26, 2000, Putin was first inaugurated on May 7, 2000. In his speech, President Putin ceremoniously promised to „take care of Russia.” Calling his inauguration a „truly historic event”, he declared that „Russia is becoming a modern democratic state.” In closing, President Putin intoned thus: „I can assure you that my work will be guided solely by the interests of the state.”

Yet in sharp contradiction to his misleadingly civilized, but lying rhetoric, there exists a much harsher truth. As part of a documentary film titled „Russia. New History.”, Putin bemoaned the „major humanitarian tragedy” of the demise of the tyrannical Soviet Union that resulted in the „disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union” and left 25 million ethnically Russian people „stateless.”

War in Ukraine

Having tried to govern Russia as if NATO and the European Union did not exist solely because they hoped that repeated appeasements would stop him in pursuing his endless aggressions in Europe, Putin has made himself a ridiculously unhinged and indeed irrationally contemptible politician even in Beijing and beyond.

Domestically, his increasingly zombie war against Ukraine has brought the Russian Federation very close to political, economic, financial as well as psychological collapse. Factually, his tyranny has already reached Stalinist dimensions. Such a turning back of the clock of history reveals a personality of a wretched, deceitful, scheming, perverted person, who is absolutely incapable of understanding even himself, let alone anybody else. Internationally, his initial image as a rational as well as highly disciplined former KGB lieutenant colonel has been completely destroyed by his inability to rein in on the many self-created insoluble contradictions of his unhealthy temperament and mental imbalance.

The prolonged war in Ukraine unmasked a political gambler who is a born delusionalist with an unshakable conviction of his own infallibility.

Internal terror

This political psychosis of tyrannical power – when no one dares to contradict the tyrant – has historically always hardened in Russia cum Soviet Union into bellicose foreign policies. Putin’s act of surrounding himself with servile sycophants is again a 21st-century repetition of Russian cum Soviet history. Likewise, the mass physical extermination of his critics and opponents is a sure sign that the Russian Federation under Putin’s long tyranny has again turned inward, ruled by ruthless internal terror.

In this manner, Putin’s foreign policy has spun into a paranoid self-defeating spectacle. Yet, the danger of Putin’s geopolitical psychosis remains because of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal. For this reason, NATO and the European Union, with the shameful exception of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, have gotten united against Putin’s hostile strategy.

Moreover, Ukraine has become the rallying point for resistance and democracy. Furthermore, the Russian Federation has been opened up to Chinese subservience. Therefore, Putin’s dream of restoring Russia’s imperial greatness will definitely end in the Russian Federation’s total isolation and ultimate defeat.

The only question is whether Russia will ever be able to overcome one day in the future Putin’s highly destructive domestic and foreign policies? Clearly, the longer he clings to power, the deeper the damage will be for his country, for Europe and for the whole world.

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