Vladimir Putin reduced to rambling and stammering in rare public appearance, suggesting something is wrong with him
The good news is that Russia is continuing to lose in Ukraine, pulling back from major cities like Kyiv and instead settling for attempting to seize a smaller portion of Ukraine. The horrifying news is that as Russia continues to lose more ground, it continues to become more cruel, carrying out genocidal ambitions in the few Ukrainian cities it does control.
Even as this tragedy plays out, Vladimir Putin’s behavior continues to grow stranger. He’s rarely appeared in public since he ordered the invasion, and when he does surface, he’s either sitting at the end of a forty foot table or he’s appearing with flight attendant trainees in incoherent propaganda videos.
Putin spoke publicly today, but it didn’t go well for him. U.S. News and World Report says that Putin “frequently seemed to ramble or stammer.” Some public speakers just stammer by default, and that’s not a sign of anything being wrong. But Putin has always been a cold, calculated, and precise speaker. For him to begin stammering, and rambling, suggests that something is going very wrong with him.
Putin’s behavior in general has been increasingly “off” since he ordered this invasion. For one thing, while he’s always been chillingly evil, he spent decades only taking the kinds of evil risks that weren’t likely to hurt him if they failed. In contrast, his invasion of Ukraine has quickly resulted in the Russian military and Russian economy being decimated, making it one of the bigger military blunders of the modern era. Putin’s increasingly paranoid antics are going well beyond anything that could reasonably protect him, and instead come off as someone suffering from paranoid delusions.
It could be that something psychological or cognitive happened to Putin that caused him to make the idiotic move of invading Ukraine. It’s also possible that because Putin is losing badly for the first time in his life, it’s caused his shift in psychology. In any case, Putin appears to be continuing to unravel – and while Ukraine is clearly winning this war, Ukrainian civilians are being slaughtered in horrifying fashion. Putin’s downfall can’t come fast enough.
