Opinion – Rodrigo Zeidan: Putin is not a genius, but a megalomaniac in a bubble of sycophants

Putin is not a genius strategist, he did not expect strong resistance from Ukraine, and he had no idea of ​​the size of the sanctions that will plunge Russia into a gigantic economic crisis. This idea that the great men in history (and they are always men in this kind of mythology) are geniuses is the result of the victors telling and distorting history.

All decisions that matter are made under conditions of incomplete and imperfect information. And, unfortunately, rationality ends up being left aside when you are surrounded by sycophants and when reality is distorted to justify any action.

Putin may be an intelligent person, but he is an incompetent leader. Like many dictators, most of his efforts are spent on plots to stay in power. Strategic geniuses don’t impoverish their country while getting involved in military adventures that end in disaster.

Worse, there is in Soviet/Russian history a military attack as meaningless as the current one: Stalin’s attempted takeover of Finland by the Soviet Union in 1939. The Russian government also thought it would conquer territory without much resistance, with the army being received as heroes to install a puppet government in the country. What followed was one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, which lasted three and a half months and left tens of thousands of Russians dead in Finnish forests. The League of Nations, a proto-UN, expelled the Soviet Union for this attack.

Eighty-two years later, Russia makes similar failures. Putin was wrong and wrong. There was no way of knowing that Europe and the US would join in international sanctions that would come to isolate the Russian Central Bank. A government that knew there would be so many sanctions would have prepared for it; instead, it had to declare a bank holiday, the stock market remains closed, with the central bank announcing day by day whether it will reopen, and energy companies have difficulty selling their oil and gas.

Russia’s GDP per capita is now lower than it was when Putin reassumed power in 2012, and that was before the coming crisis. In part, this war is a response to your government’s failure to improve the economy. There were no reforms, the public spending limit was abandoned, unemployment stopped falling (it went from 8.3% in 2009 to 5.4% in 2012, and today it is 5.5%, and inflation soared from 5 % in 2012 to 8.4% today). The economy is on the sidelines, even with the country becoming one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world, responsible for 10% of world production.

The Russian preparation really counted on weak Ukrainian resistance. The country also did not anticipate that Germany would change a decades-old policy of banning arms shipments to countries in conflict. Russia can still win the war whenever it wants, but only if it decides to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, blowing up urban centers.

Putin’s mistakes are on all fronts of the campaign. As a strategist, Putin is just a megalomaniac who lives in a bubble, hearing from others only what he wants to hear. Putin is a Latin American dictator in spirit, only with nuclear weapons and sycophants around him who speak Russian instead of Spanish or Portuguese. Few are really the great men of history. Putin is not one of them; he’s just a comic book villain and now a war criminal. And that he can blow everyone up.