Love Imperial Russia, Disdain USSR? Putin’s Ideology & McCain’s Mistake

“Moscow is silent!” This message had a profound impact on Mr. Putin. He received it in Dresden. It was 1989!

IN THE NEWS:

What Does Mr. Putin Want?

I recently came across an account about Mr. Putin’s early years. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, when Mr. Putin was assessed decades ago as a young recruit to the KGB, he was found to have a “lowered sense of danger”. What does a “lowered sense of danger” mean to you? To me, it sounds like Mr. Putin is willing to take big risks.

If he is in fact a big risk-taker, what is he aiming for?

A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times calls Mr. Putin a “demonic little man”, among many other expletives, in a recent opinion piece in which she writes about Mr. Putin’s need to feed his “Cold War dreams”. So is that it? Mr. Putin wants Russia to return to the good old Soviet days?

That’s a big question, one that our podcast guest, Professor Kathryn Stoner of Stanford University, addressed in an essay titled “The Putin Puzzle: Why Ukraine? Why now?”, which was published in the Wall Street Journal,