WHAT IS PUTIN UP TO?
By prof. Andrzej Krzeczunowicz
(Anglo-Polish Society, Jan. 26 2016)

 Putin is making his first visit to Crimea since its annexation, 9 May 2014

I am sure you have all heard Winston Churchill's famous remark about Russia which he described as a puzzle within a riddle inside an enigma. Remembering this quotation makes it all the more difficult to explain what Putin is up to. Nonetheless I shall risk an analysis of the situation, hoping that the result will be clear and satisfactory.

If we were drinking buddies I would ask Putin sitting on the barstool next to mine: tell me, Vladimir Vladimirovitch, what's your problem? If I were also a psychiatrist I would probably recognise a case of acute frustration backed by a strong wish to compensate for past failures and misfortunes. A useful pointer to this way of thinking is the speech Putin made in 2005 'on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two. He said then that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century had been the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not two murderous world wars, not the Holocaust and other genocides - no, it had been the fall of the USSR. That its disintegration had meant the liberation of more than twenty countries from Russian colonial or ideological domination did not enter his mind. So we have here a clue that frustration plays a role in his behaviour and probably even more than that, namely a sense of humiliation at the loss of empire and of superpower status...

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