Last Friday night David Brooks (on PBS NewsHour) emphasized the need to understand Vladimir Putin to understand what will happen next in Ukriane (and beyond?): “The main show is in Vladimir Putin’s brain. It’s sort of striking how it’s just one person who really matters here. And the brain, as it’s revealed it to us, even in speeches this week, is pretty aggressive, pretty assertive, growing increasingly more assertive. And it seems to me, in our response, we really need a psychiatrist more than a foreign policy apparatus. We need to understand what is going to upset him, what is going to disrupt him. And I’m afraid the way that we have done the sanctions has not been well-tailored to sort of a psychological campaign against Vladimir Putin.” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-brooks-keystone-politics-nevada-land-dispute/)
This weekend there were two articles about Putin, one about Putin and right wing nationalists in Europe from The Economist and the other about Putin and the US. Both are helpful in this broader question how to understand Czar Vladimir.
CLICK HERE for The Economist
CLICK HERE for The Atlantic