Inside Putin’s Head? President Xi, Rasputin’s Ghost, and a Bag of Crafty Cats

Per BBC reporting, analysts or “spies” in the West are trying to game out what’s in Putin’s head. What are his motives, goals, possible acceptable outs, and what exactly is his endgame with starting a war in Europe, and now asking China to help with it?

Is Putin forcing Xi’s hand or being led by it? Is he testing the waters of war (for them both) or testing the new besties forever Russo-Sino relationship; testing Xi’s pliability, and China’s appetite for war; trying to start an all out East-West world war now, on Russia’s best timeline and on China’s political dime, just to screw with China’s rise (China’s economy is now roughly 10x Russia’s and still growing, when the two were roughly the same size in the 1980s), and locking out everyone’s better let alone best options, to drive a better wedge permanently between China and the rest of the world while he can and pulling Xi to his side Thelma and Louise style; hitting the gas and steering us all off a cliff; upturning the world’s ‘super’ apple carts all at once, and turning on the fog machine of war, fuck you NATO, just to see how things between China and the West turn out? Trying to get away with all he can, forcing China to buy his oil, feeding direcly into his personal coffers, daring anyone to stop him or even notice?

Or again, is Xi more realistically the ‘top’ in the newly evolving ‘life partner’ phase of their Sino-Russo relationship, pulling the strings and planting seeds while teasing about silver patterns?

Did Xi give Putin a full-on verbal head fake, in their very own Dictators on a Train moment, while antiquing in Beijing?

Oh, you should toooohh-tallly invade Ukraine!

I mean, by rights, if you ask me, all Europe should be speaking Russian, and it probably already would be, if it weren’t for that pesky NATO.

Ughhh, I so want to drop a bomb on them. Don’t you? Wouldn’t that be fun?

Oh, wait. Hold everything.

I just thought of something.

You’re gonna kill me, when I say, ’cause you know I’m right. Ready? Are you sure? Ukrainian blue matches your eyes! (Cheerleader shimmy fists) Squeal!

You have to haves it!!! Ooooooo, look! An armoire.

Anyway, where were we?

Or, right; your invading Ukraine.

Have at it, Boo! We got people to kill too. I get it.

We’ll help … all we can.

Does Putin himself even know? Or care entirely?

Or is he just bungling and making it up as he goes?

Is Putin even rational at this point (if he ever was)?

Or is he ‘hearing voices’ that aren’t entirely grounded in reality — from the voices in his head telling him that he is Peter the Great reborn (although thirteen, count ’em, thir-teen inches shorter and in other ways likely vexing to the petite respawn …not so great) to the fawning yes-men and oligarchical toadies of his inner circle (all of whom are saying Yes and spinning Stalin-grade crazy yarns of Russian readiness and riches and Russia über alles for the mini-master’s ear …under penalty of death: upon which Putin is making global promises and taking bloody action)?

A lot to consider.

Exploring questions like these and more from all angles, now, is vital. To stop Putin and end the bloodshed in Europe, not to mention the chaos in the global economy, and toxic multi-region instability, we need to get in his calm little cranium and figure out what he’s scheming so that we can get out ahead of him and cut him off before he drags all of us across the Rubicon into war (if we haven’t already passed it a few miles back).

As Biden probably said to Xi, last they spoke:

We should keep our friends close, our enemies closer, and all the world’s incompetent whack jobs on a leash.

Put differently:

We all need to proceed carefully with — and take a seriously self-interested longsighted step-back beat or two to rethink — the grown-up nested cabbage patch doll running Russia.

So, for the reassessment, what’s he thinking?

Putin’s head — an overview

Putin’s the world’s angry ex. We’ve moved on, and they can’t find happiness on their own; endlessly reliving the past, on toxic loop, attempting to get a do-over on the relationship they can’t accept is over. Trying to relitigate the past and drawing others into it. Not respecting boundaries. Causing everyone around them misery. Meanwhile, Putin’s also an apparently unhinged incompetent global thrill seeker; an aging and now quite possibly complexly demented out of shape Jackass wannabe who just jumped out of a plane with a baseball bat and told China to bring him a chute.

Forgive these grotesque oversimplifications and the twisted mixed metaphors, but you don’t have to binge watch Dexter: New Blood or the original to know that ‘overly simple’ is the worldview of a diseased mind, specifically of a psychopathic mind, one devoid of conscience, one likely to thrive in KGB-level ruthlessness and transactional global calculus, one capable of ‘running game’ on multiple world leaders, one capable of committing acts of violence, murder, and aggression toward others for the sake of it or because it pleases them in some way, satisfying some need, feeding their “dark passenger” or achieving a cold long-term secondary objective; one capable of unleashing the horrors of war on a nation and a people and a world living in peace in the near term (without extreme duress or immanent threat, and without exploring and exhausting all other options) just to get what their after in the long run.

What’s Putin after?

As many observe, if a bit linearly: The fertile fields and other sizable rich resources of Ukraine (the second largest country in Europe, by area, second only to Momma Russia herself; home to a third of the world’s black soil and a nifty-big sub-geriatric workforce) are obvious targets. Feeding on the carcass of a broken Ukraine is enough to make a syphilitic oligarch blush, contracts for rebuilding what he’s blowing up alone will run into the billions (nearing $600 billion, as of mid-March, per Ukrainian estimates), and Putin’s got mouths to feed; running a country on graft is expensive.

The nostalgia- and megalomaniacal ego-driven notions of Russian reunification is another possible goal, getting the band of the Soviet Union back together, even though the guitarist is now a dentist and happily married with two kids and a modest though thriving practice and they don’t want to or need to try and be famous again just because your life didn’t work out they way you hoped or you’re going through something, and your therapist and Rasputin’s ghost agree it would good for you right now, and no; going on tour, waking up in our vomit on the bus or in your gulag wasn’t awesome. Please stop calling!

Sidebar: Benjamin Sledge unpacks these goals well tactically and economically (read, geopolitically) in his March 1 piece — still one of the most compelling and well-written of the one-stop overviews. Sledge has 30k fans for a reason. His stress on the multidimensional and durable dire straights in Russia let us know that it’s not just about ego or aggression alone; Putin’s not just crazy (as fun as it might be to say); he’s desperate, serious, smart, and unlikely to stop. Very important to keep in mind. That said, I still hold that murdering people, going to war, and destroying a neighboring country to achieve these ends, are the actions of a psychopath, and so qualify Putin as a special kind of madman (read, crazy); in fact, that his motives are well reasoned make it more likely that he is a psychopath (read, scary crazy), not less (read, proves my point), and thus returns us to the crazy thread herein (read, truth in satire), already in progress.

With respect to NATO, the EU, and the US (the West), and skipping over the whole a best defense is a buffer zone of dead people, two for flinching, we want to put our missiles on your border and see how you like it, let them speak Russian!, cover story and cutting to what comes next, worst case scenario, he may be trying to get a full-on redo of WW II, specifically targeting ‘rolling back’ how things ‘shook out’ for the US and the West, since World War II.

In this scenario, he’ll need Ukrainian resources and compliance, if he’s to be ready to go when the ‘bell’ sounds; in order to withstand sanctions, better, and takeover or at least control the rest of Europe.

Yeah, I’m not finding that many new words on the Boggle board, and everyone is busy writing [esp. w/ref. to China’s rise; no end in sight, leaving them in the dust, and worse, China and the US possibly finding their way to peaceful collaboration], so how ‘bout I grab the lid, slap it down, and start shaking?

Sick to put it that way or even to think it, yes, but also potentially disturbingly accurate and possibly in play, in Putin’s head, all the way up to Cuban Missile Crisis-style brinksmanship, JFK plagiarism, and all-out war — one for more of the marbles. The most shaken of Boggle boards, another world war, may just be the path to the greatest oligarchic wealth imaginable and the path to locking in his legacy as a newfangled mini-mega-tsar. At least as he sees it; psychopaths think different.

Short of that, still with respect to NATO, the EU, and the US (the West), he may be trying to, and to some degree he may have already achieved, in his head, getting a reboot of the Cold War — at least within Russia — a return to the good old days, back when Russia was great again (get your MRGA hat here), back when things made sense, good-old KGB sense! When Russians were soviet and the world was nervous. A return to 100% state run media (check), poisoning, jailing, and/or scapegoating all traitors (check, check, and check), a return to endless open conflict with the West (still loading), and most important of all, a return to Russia being part of the ‘super-powerful’ discussion.

And China?

Where does China come in, in Putin’s head — and visa versa? Are the China Gambit and the Ukraine Maneuver part of a thirty-year-long sucker punch and if so who’s throwing it?

As the dead-guy’s limited-response hologram keeps saying to Will Smith’s character, while he’s working the case of his jumping through an unbreakable million-story window, in I, Robot, (trying to get into Putin’s head is after all a murder mystery; and not so much of a whodunnit as a why’d they do it),

That, Detective, is the right question.

For now, China is Putin’s key back into the executive washroom of world affairs, making everything possible; all his hopes and dreams.

For Putin and his oligarch-infested state, it could be as sick, stuck in the past, and simple as that.

Team Putin can’t do much well and won’t hold onto superpower status much longer (beyond their nuclear arsenal’s bonafide claim to it), without help and sign-off from the far better-run China.

Tripping up China in the process may just be the tsvety on the skazka.

As for Xi, The Economist has a ‘one-page’ summary of Xi’s motives and the current let them eat Russian thinking in Beijing, per best reporting,

“The Alternative World Order: The war in Ukraine will determine how China sees the world — and how threatening it becomes” — highly recommended.

In short: we have two worked-up, power-hungry, and morally-flexible world leaders with nukes and huge armies using their obsession with the West and their lubed up pillow-talk chats with each other as justifications and tools to murder people and take what they want, if and when they choose to.

Where will they stop?

Who and what will stop them?

Story sill developing, read: devolving.