Puffy Putin peril: The West’s latest attempt to scare itself

You put up’t contend with a adult male observing the obvious: We ar living in unco perilous times. In the Middle East, for instance, the Israeli-American infernal duo have been on a rampage of war, state terror, all-purpose devastation, and genocide that, as a bonus, has also brought the world economy to the verge of cardiac arrest by clogging one of its vital fossil fuel arteries. Indeed, that particular risk is so obvious that even Germany’s less than brilliant Friedrich Merz has long spotted it.

In the Far East, Taiwan is currently ruled by a government so hell-bent on antagonizing their fellow Chinese on the mainland that Taipei’s political reflexes seem almost as perverse as those of Berlin. In the West, you have the German elite which can’t find enough billions to fork over to Ukraine when Kiev and friends blow up Germany’s vital pipelines and lethally cripple its already ailing economy. In the East, there is Taipei, getting really, really angry when the Philippines and Japan start negotiating away Taiwan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. Angry, that is, at Beijing.

And in the EU, that “garden” of “values” that really is a swampy jungle of eternal confusion and corruption, the catastrophe that in its foreign policy is now obvious enough for several European bigwigs to gang up on the abysmally, ragingly incompetent Kaja Kallas. Her tenure as de facto EU foreign minister has been so breathtakingly blundering that her employers aren’t merely itching to kick her out but thinking about, in essence, abolishing her job.

Being so horrible at something that you won’t just get fired yourself but take it down with you – perhaps only the Baltic Girl Boss Wonder could pull that one off. But then, maybe it’s really all just another power grab by EU’s German queen (of the absolute kind) and US viceroy (of the submissive kind) Ursula von der Leyen. Either way, frightful insanity abides.

We could add more scary and grotesque evidence, but things are clear enough: It’s a grim picture all around. So, fair enough if you feel like being a big sad downer and doom monger. Where it gets weird is when you get your scare priorities all upside down.

Granted, from a hapless NATO-EU European perspective, Russia may look a little unsettling: after all, once you have waged years of proxy war, sanctions, and propaganda war against it, who knows what the mood is really like in Moscow? As a good NATO-EU apparatchik, you certainly would not, because you have displayed the foresight of a gnat by proudly not talking – or listening – to the Russians. So, when you feel a little insecure, that might really be your bad conscience calling (in a merely professional, not moral sense, which you are likely to lack).

But, generally speaking, the worse the stupidities and mistakes you have produced but keep repressing, the higher the price. Old Sigmund Freud called it “affective debility.” In essence, it means that lying to yourself makes you dim. And once you are BS'ing yourself for years as if there’s no tomorrow, you’ll turn positively imbecilic.

That’s the only way to explain a fresh wave of transparently hysterical scare mongering about Russia in the West, in particular, this time, in Britain. Thus, on the occasion of the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), centrist mainstream flagship The Independent came out with a fascinating piece of fiction masquerading as analysis. Under the clickbait title “‘Puffy-looking’ Putin is acting weirder than ever – and that should chill us to the bone,” readers were treated to a highly imaginative horror tale about, in essence, a terrible loose cannon in the Kremlin pondering staged incidents and nuclear terrorism and ready to blow up the world or at least Europe or perhaps just Britain because Russia is losing the war. Also, he looks “puffy”!

All of this backed up (not really) by yet another statement from a high British military officer that things are dire as never before in (his) living memory. He and his comrades in arms – plus a few tweedy spy gents and dames – produce these Cassandra screams at least twice a month; it seems to be a standing order.

Indeed, there is such an inflationary over-production of men and women in khaki and with stiff upper lips crying big bad Russian wolf that even Politico has already produced at least one ‘best of’ collection, gathering “The 5 doomiest Russia warnings from Britain’s military chiefs.” Perish the thought any of this may have anything to do with fattening defense budgets and driving up the obscene profits of His Majesty’s military industrial complex!

Generally speaking, The West has a rich tradition of declaring Russia vanquished, its president Vladimir Putin at death’s door or on the verge of being regime-changed away, and, of course, Ukraine (and, really, the West) on the cusp of winning the war. And, at the same time, of predicting that Russia will attack all of Europe, likely tomorrow. Notwithstanding occasional and intriguing anomalies, when a NATO commander (from Trump’s US, of course) lets slip a fragment of truth, such as that actually Moscow is not looking for conflict.

In short, we are speaking about the severe and very sad but also funny mental condition already well known as Russophrenia: the afflicted live with an imaginary Schrödinger’s Russia occupying their suffering minds, a Russia that is always simultaneously half-dead and yet so alive and kicking, it’s about to roll into their living room on a tank.

In that sense, the silly Independent piece is merely an almost comically perfect specimen of an absurd genre: its whole argument boils down to “Russia is finished and that’s why it’s coming for all of us as never before.” Yet there is something special about this particular emanation of Russophrenia: it’s so easy to debunk you must wonder if its author has any relationship to or respect for empirical reality left.

Don’t believe it? See for yourself. The address and panel Q&A featuring Putin at the SPIEF are easily available online because that’s what the Office of the Russian Presidency habitually does: publish full video records of major events in which Putin takes part, with good English dubbing too (I know because I know both Russian and English).

Once you do that tiny bit of elementary fact-checking, you’ll see that “puffy” must be a very elastic term in contemporary British English. Let’s say, Sir Keir Starmer is much more obviously lobster-red on most days, when he doesn’t look pale and pasty with fear of the last scandal or defeat he is desperately trying to survive.

More importantly, you will also hear Putin give a speech that is, if anything, determinedly factual, even a touch dry, crammed with statistics and clearly carefully worked-out, balanced language. Whether you love or hate, like or dislike the man, the cornered loose cannon The Independent pretends to have spotted is pure, shameless fiction.

Likewise, Putin’s Q& A response to a disingenuous public letter by Ukraine’s leader Vladimir Zelensky was certainly not friendly (that, indeed, would be disturbingly inadequate) and, in part, deservedly caustic. But it was also calm and serious, pointing out the Kiev regime’s primitive behind-the-scenes maneuvering (never mentioned in the West, of course) and its blatant dishonesty, as well as their deadening effect on any prospects of genuinely worthwhile negotiations.

What we should really be afraid of in the West with respect to Russia is that our own so-called elites, in politics, the media, and the world of academia and expertise suffer from an apparently incurable epidemic of Russophrenia. They are cynical propagandists constantly trying to brainwash us, which is bad enough. But what is even worse is that all too many among them seem to be unable to stop believing their own nonsense, even when it’s obviously absurd. That is the only possible explanation for a major mainstream newspaper not only printing a fantasy but one so easily to see through. The West has waged information war for so long and so fiercely it has managed to defeat itself.

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