Has Putin lost the plot?

Sitting alone at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned behind a vast desk in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin’s idea of social distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little more than 48 hours, Putin’s sensible, peace-talking statesman act flipped into something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters.

As Putin’s hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: ‘Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out].’

Indeed. Putin’s rambling and uncharacteristically emotional address to the nation and the bizarrely staged Security Council meeting that preceded it carried the distinct whiff of the dying days of the USSR. The ministers standing by to publicly agree (some more convincingly than others) with the boss; the formulaic tropes about protecting Russian-speaking people from ‘genocide’; the clichés about the ‘illegitimate’ government in Kiev. The spectacle resembled nothing so much as Leonid Brezhnev’s slurred 1979 announcement that the Soviet Union had to fulfil its ‘internationalist duty’ to protect the people of Afghanistan.

How did Putin, the three-dimensional chess player whose cynical but often brilliant opportunism leveraged Russia from a middling regional power to world player, come to this? Covid distancing could have something to do with it. According to members of the Kremlin press pool, Putin’s paranoia over the virus has been extreme. He has forced everyone in his entourage to do frequent tests and pass through a disinfection tunnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. The information bubble in which Putin — who famously doesn’t use a computer or the internet, which he considers a CIA creation — has lived for two decades has, over the past two years, become an echo chamber.