"Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors": political scientist Ivan Krastev interviewed about Vladimir Putin

DER SPIEGEL: What was your impression of Putin?

Krastev: Very intelligent and quick, forthright, confrontative. Sarcastic when speaking with someone from the West. But it is the small things that reveal the most about people. He held forth about the situation in the Donbas like a foreign service agent who knows how many people live in each village and what the situation is like in each of them. He considered the fact that primarily women were responsible for Russia policy in the Obama administration to be an intentional attempt to humiliate him. The hypocrisy of the West has become an obsession of his, and it is reflected in everything the Russian government does. Did you know that in parts of his declaration on the annexation of Crimea, he took passages almost verbatim from the Kosovo declaration of independence, which was supported by the West? Or that the attack on Kyiv began with the destruction of the television tower just as NATO attacked the television tower in Belgrade in 1999?

I recommend this interview. It reinforces my idea that Putin's wars have been reactions to US actions starting with Kosovo in 1999. He sees the Americans and British as hypocrites and this is very understandable. We are not hypocrites in the true sense of the world because a hypocrite is a conscious dissembler, but we have been hypocrites in the modern post Freudian sense of the word, meaning not seeing the mote in our own eye, for example in making war on Yugoslavia and recognising Kosovo as an independent country.

Mr Krastev thinks Putin and his KGB colleagues are full of guilt that they let the Soviet Union come to an end.