In the Ukraine war, many media speculate about Vladimir Putin’s sanity. They are making it too easy for themselves, says biographer Hubert Seipel.
Moscow – War is breaking a taboo, always. This is also the opinion of the Putin biographer and journalist Hubert Seipel. In an interview with the district newspaper, he explains what he thinks of Putin being described as “insane” or “insane” and what role he believes the personalization of conflicts plays in the war. Seipel considers the man in the crisis to be insane currently sees only one way outthe Russian President does not: he believes the discussion leaves out a lot of crucial context.
Mr. Seipel, the current media and social debate is always about pathological explanations for Russia’s war of aggression, people talk about Putin’s mental health, and the image of the “mad man” is drawn. How do you feel about this?
War is always a clear violation of a taboo, including in Ukraine, even if war has been waged regularly for as long as anyone can remember and everyone protests that they don’t want it. In view of the human suffering, the war dead and the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, you can hardly talk about the causes of the war. We’ve had peace in Europe for a long time now, but with this peace the wars were just somewhere else: in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or Mali, and we were there militarily.
And then you try to deny the opponent’s intellectual maturity?
Declaring your opponent insane is an old political pattern, because the PR formula applies to everyone involved: “We don’t want war.” So only the opponent can be crazy. Each party affirms that it was forced to go to war to prevent the adversary from destroying “our values,” endangering our freedoms, or destroying ourselves outright. That was the case shortly before the First World War in August 1914.
The personalization of conflicts is also typical of psychological warfare. The division is clear. The Ukrainian President is currently in the media landscape Volodymyr Zelenskyy the hero and the Russian president the madman. However, this consideration leaves out the question of how and why it could have come to this.
Russia is pursuing clear interests in Ukraine, which Putin has repeatedly formulated more or less clearly. At the same time, he is said to be acting irrationally. Do you see a pattern there?
Politics is determined by history, by people’s experiences, by current events and concrete interests. The Russian President grew up in St. Petersburg, studied law and then worked for the Russian secret service. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was deputy mayor under his former law professor Sobchak in his hometown before making a career for himself under Yeltsin in the Kremlin.
And the collapse of the Soviet Union shaped Vladimir Putin?
Putin followed the arguments between then US President Bill Clinton and a weak Boris Yeltsin very closely and never forgot the famous sentence of the first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, as he once told me. The purpose of NATO in Europe, Ismay announced, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”
Since then, NATO has expanded from 12 members to 30 members as far east as the Russian border. Historical developments cannot be reversed. But the sentence that NATO will “not expand an inch further east”, which the American Secretary of State James Baker publicly announced on February 9, 1990 in the Catherine Hall of the Kremlin as the prize for German reunification, also made a deep impression on Vladimir Putin .
Hubert Seipel on nuclear weapons and the escalation of the Ukraine war: “I don’t think Putin is a suicide”
Looking ahead, many media outlets are already invoking the use of nuclear weapons. Do you consider the use of nuclear weapons or an extension of the war to other countries to be conceivable?
I don’t think Putin is suicidal. But I’m not his psychoanalyst either, and I’m not a prophet, just a journalist.
Even those who previously thought of Putin as a well-thought-out strategist and did not expect the war to escalate could have their doubts in view of the shots at the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia. How do you classify the events?
It may or may not be. In a state of war I’m pretty skeptical about reports of victory or defeat, casualties or atrocities – no matter which side announces them. I can’t judge that because I don’t have the reliable information on it.
Vladimir Putin in the early 2000s would probably have acted differently than he does today. How do you explain Russia’s change of course and in what context do you see NATO’s eastward expansion?
Putin’s clear geopolitical announcement came in Bucharest in May 2008. At that time, under pressure from George Bush, NATO promised Ukraine membership in NATO. Under pressure from Germany and France, but without an exact date. Putin was also in Bucharest and warned the military alliance: “We have no right of veto and we don’t pretend that we have one either.” But Russia has concrete security interests. He emphasized the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. The announcement was unequivocal: “The emergence of a powerful military bloc on our border would be seen by Russia as a direct threat to our country’s security.”
Since this meeting at the latest, he has been convinced that the United States would implement what the former US security adviser Brzenski had already said in his 1997 book The Only World Power. America’s strategy of supremacy’. The EU and NATO should quickly accept the former Eastern European states into the EU and at the same time into NATO, and the process should also be completed with Ukraine by 2010 at the latest. You know the rest.
Putin biographer on developments in the Ukraine war: “The only important question is how past injuries can be accounted for today.”
What exactly is driving Vladimir Putin in this war?
They are quite different motives. On the one hand, the growing assessment that the West does not see Russia as important and does not see it as equal and that the EU and Germany only expect Moscow to adapt to European rules. Putin believes that German politics primarily only takes into account the interests of the former Soviet republics such as Poland or the Baltic states, all of which still have unfinished business from the days of the Soviet Union.
The important question is how to offset past injuries today. The war, which since then has revolved around one’s own national memory, instead of the memory of the wars, has only one result, namely “war.” That was the last sentence I wrote in my book “Putin’s Power” and that was before the invasion.
What other motivation is there for Vladimir Putin?
The other reason is the question of neutrality of Ukraine. In 2015, Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia agreed to resolve the conflict peacefully with the Minsk 2 Treaty. That hasn’t happened to this day. Like his predecessor, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy blocked the key points that Kyiv would pass a constitutional reform that would give the separatist areas autonomy after a vote under OSCE supervision, and we didn’t exert any pressure either.
On December 9, 2019, at the meeting of the Presidents and Angela Merkel in Paris, negotiations had been held months earlier and it had been decided to withdraw heavy weapons along the entire ceasefire line. The newly elected president told an angry Merkel that he would not do it anyway – for domestic reasons. Nothing has changed since then. The situation has worsened. In June 2020, NATO elevated Ukraine to the status of a “preferred partner” in order to “deepen further cooperation”. America has continued to deliver arms to Kyiv and Putin has been arming the Donbass. Merkel is no longer involved.
Recently, speculation about Putin’s health had accumulated in the media
Recently, various media had repeatedly speculated about Vladimir Putin’s state of health. There has been speculation as to whether the Russian president’s actions in the Ukraine war could be linked to problems with his mental health. Hubert Seipel, among others, criticizes this and sees it as an old means of psychological warfare. In particular, Seipel criticizes the fact that such an approach significantly shifts the discourse and leaves out important context in a complex geopolitical situation.
Hubert Seipel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. Among other things, he wrote for Stern and worked as a foreign correspondent for Der Spiegel. Seipel also conducted the world’s first television interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden, which was broadcast by ARD in January 2014. The journalist has already written several books about Vladimir Putin. (This is part two of one two-part interview)* kreiszeitung.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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