Putin's Attack on Ukraine Is an Attempt to Delay His Own Inevitable Demise — TIME
Putin fears death—like any 69-year-old. His fear, however, is particularly acute. He makes (or so the consistent rumour goes) visiting officials submit faeces test to ensure they are disease free. Since COVID-19, officials have to
isolate several days before they see him. Those who don’t, like the
visiting French President Emmanuel Macron, are seated down the other end of an absurdly long table. Is Putin immune-compromised? Maybe. He’s clearly petrified and paranoid of death.
Unlike the rest of us, he can project his fears onto whole countries. In his embarrassing ramblings about Ukraine he never talks about the future—he wants to escape the future and what it brings. He “justifies” his invasion through the desire to return the past: take Ukraine back to the 19th century, to the Soviet Union, to his youth. He rambles menacingly about restoring the glories of the Russian Empire, picking apart Lenin’s creation of Soviet Republics, undoing the revolution against his satrap Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
When he met President Macron, Putin quoted a vile Russian rape joke where sleeping beauty is sexually abused. Conflating Ukraine and Sleeping Beauty, he put himself in the role of the rapist: “Whether you like it or not my beauty, you will need to put up with all I do to you.” The choice of fairy tale was telling. Sleeping Beauty never gets old, even as the castle around her overgrows with rust and ivy.
In his replies the 44-year-old Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quipped “Ukraine is indeed a beauty but she’s not yours.”
How easy it would have been for Putin to create a flourishing Russia, with its vast oil wealth and human talent, to become a country that Ukraine would want to be close to! Instead, he created a country that stinks of fear, death, and murder that Ukraine has been trying to escape from. The Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn once found a metaphor for the Kremlin’s system in the title of one of his novels: Cancer Ward. It remains a potent metaphor. Cancers want to spread: to metastasize through Europe and beyond.
Putin’s diagnosis is terminal. Who will it kill? Ukraine is fighting to the death—and choosing life.