‘Live long enough and you watch everyone go mad,’ the man said to me gloomily. It was around 2009, and I was listening to a former senior civil servant tell me what he had learned from a life spent in diplomacy.
I’m not sure even he envisioned seeing proper madness in a world leader until Putin’s televised hour-long pantomime earlier this week. Putin over those 60 minutes was a man marinating in rage and possessed of a worldview built on paranoia and ego.
The performance culminated in him recognising the ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. The moment he did this he smashed the Minsk peace process designed – theoretically at least – to bring about resolution to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. From there, the next steps were obvious. The ‘leaders’ of the bogus republic then asked Russia to send in troops to help ‘keep the peace.’ Putin obliged, he was, he said, sending forces in help ‘de-nazify’ Ukraine – whose President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is of course Jewish.
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