Thread by @JMichaelWaller

1) Last summer, a colleague and I published a long review of Vladimir Putin's psychological motivations. It's an unsparing profile, going back to Putin's childhood, adolescence, and his membership in a Leningrad street gang that reputedly raped weak boys. centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/upl…

2) Putin has presented special riddles as to his actions, motivations, and goals, even today. Many critics, at home and in the West, paint him as nearly invincible. Some astute observers say he nurses profound personal vulnerabilities ripe for exploitation.

3) The Russian version of our report is here. centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/upl…

4) Excerpts: "Effective exploitation of Putin’s weak points requires a certain degree of political incorrectness that few Kremlin-watchers or geostrategists seem willing to risk. That reluctance has squandered endless opportunities to hem in the Russian dictator ..."

5) Descriptions of Putin generally "have played into his
propagandistic image of himself as all-powerful and
even invincible. Many observers seem to forget that,
of course, Putin is only a man. As with all human
beings, Putin has his own inner psyche."

6) Contempt is an important element of Putin's psychology. "It is not only contempt for what he almost regards as weak—and possibly, in his macho world view, effeminate—western leaders. More important is his contempt for their institutions such as international treaties & laws."

7) Something very personal about Putin "is decidedly unacceptable in Russian culture, particularly in the grand tradition that he purports to guard and revive."

8) "It is this aspect of Putin’s internal being—that the Russian leader likely believes that the real Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin never would be accepted in his own country—that merits careful study."

9) British & US intelligence made psychological profiles of Hitler during World War II, to seek ways of exploiting Hitler's vulnerabilities to bring the war to a faster end. They concluded that Hitler feared ostracism about his "psychosexual repression" and predicted his suicide.

10) Putin "does appear to suffer from personality disorders and psychopathologies that, in an ordinary person, would merit understanding and compassion. In Putin’s case, however, where issues of war and peace are at stake, they represent ..." (continued)

11) "... personal vulnerabilities that, properly exploited,
constitute weaknesses in his personalist regime."

The CIA's former top profiler said Putin suffered from "childhood or adolescent abuse." Putin was teased and bullied in school, and "responded viciously."

12) Gerrold Post: "This was an early example of narcissistic dynamics—an exaggerated defense overcompensating for his underlying insecurity. Putin was also incapable of handling criticism from teachers, openly expressing outrage at being reprimanded."

13) Andrew Kuchins of Georgetown University asked what few dare ask: Is Putin’s behavior rooted in repressed sexuality, and if so, is it of a repressed homosexual? Kuchins commented in 2015: “Having to repress his homosexuality may explain a good deal of aberrant behavior.”

14) "many Putin observers and biographers touched upon the personality disorders and psychopathologies associated with gay men who are either in denial or live clandestinely .... This is where a psychobiography of Putin is important..."

15) "A former prominent Russian official who knew Putin during their teenage years in Leningrad told the authors at a Harvard event that Putin had been part of a street gang that raped boys whom they considered weak or effeminate...."

16) "He did not know whether the practice was out of sexual orientation or as a means of insecure adolescents to dominate and humiliate."

Either way, that practice is what kept Putin from becoming a KGB foreign intelligence officer, but made him ideal for political enforcement.

17) Putin never became a "spymaster" because Western intelligence services could have compromised him over his hidden background. That background kept him out of the most prestigious part of the KGB - the First Chief Directorate. Instead he spent his career in internal security.

18) "Former Russian domestic intelligence officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, a veteran of the Federal Security Service (FSB) who defected to London, wrote an article in 2006 describing Putin as a 'pedophile' with an interest in small boys."

19) "Litvinenko said he learned the secret in the late 1990s: 'when Putin became the FSB director and was preparing for the presidency, he began to seek and destroy any compromising materials' that the KGB had collected...."

20) Former FSB officer Litvinenko: "'Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him making sex with some underage boys.”

21) "A Russian government death squad later murdered Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, with a British inquiry later concluding that Putin 'probably' gave the orders personally."

22) "Homosexuality is not the issue to exploit. Putin’s
apparent denial or repression of his supposed homosexuality is what makes him—and therefore his regime—very vulnerable if Western leaders or domestic rivals know how to play it."

23) "The KGB did not recruit [foreign] gays because they were gay; it recruited repressed gays because they were either considered vulnerable to blackmail or tended to feel a need to fight back at their real or imagined oppressors and to become empowered."

24) "The KGB did not recruit repressed Soviet gays as its own foreign intelligence officers. Part of the reason
is why most intelligence services, including the CIA today, would not generally recruit a repressed homosexual because of susceptibility to blackmail..." (continued)

25) "... it is his fear of exposure, not his homosexuality, that presents the vulnerability. This is why U.S. intelligence services require gays to inform their families and friends of their orientation prior to being considered for the intelligence profession."

26) "What the KGB foreign intelligence service did do was to recruit Western repressed gays because it regarded them as resentful and more willing to 'get back' at their societies by working for the KGB. This is not the same as sexual blackmail" or kompromat.

27) "A third reason to believe that Putin is hiding a tormented sexual orientation in a manner affecting international security and diplomacy is related to his multiple identities as various Kremlinologists such as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy have documented."

28) "These multiple identities could be a means of coping with a world that would never accept the real Vladimir Putin.... The Hill and Gaddy psychological profile of Putin also notes a multiplicity of personalities and fabricated identities in the 'elusive' Russian president."

29) "Denial of sensitive posts for a talented person with such vulnerabilities were the KGB security practices of the time and remain standard in most of the world’s major intelligence services. However ..."

30) "... Putin had the drive, talent, instincts, and temperament beneficial for KGB service. It thus suited the KGB’s purposes to place such a repressed individual in the internal security services to more easily oppress the population of a society that was oppressing him."

31) "So Putin’s facility with false and changing identities is not explained by his KGB training or work. It can be explained, however, as part of a coping strategy of gay men who faced devaluation growing up."

32) "Bergler the psychoanalyst, noted that gay men in denial, in addition to the panoply of masochistic relations with other people, sometimes also practice what he termed a 'Herostratic act.' ..."

33) "... This act of great destructiveness is named after Herostratos, who burned down the temple of Artemis in ancient Greece with the sole purpose of gaining fame...."

34) "... Some of Putin’s great risks that Russia-watchers may have interpreted as fulfilling some logical (at least for his goals) political purpose just may have been Herostratic acts...."

35) "... We may yet see even bigger such acts
as Putin faces pressure and feels even more vulnerable
by events around him as Russia continues to decline
into the third decade of his rule."

36) "The authors of this article jointly wrote a policy memorandum for the Trump national security transition team in late 2016, describing how the US could exploit Putin’s repressed personal traits to temper his authoritarian personal rule and subversive international behavior.

37) "We see how Trump used his uncanny and unorthodox business methods ably to gauge the psychological profiles of both allies and adversaries in his personal high-level, behind-the-scenes actions ..." (continued)

38) "& other unconventional politics to innovate in certain forms of personal statecraft with world leaders. Throughout his presidency, Trump maintained an uncharacteristically low-key approach toward Putin" while sending Ukraine lethal weapons, pushing NATO, shutting NordStream2

39) Trump quietly turned the screws on Putin, "All without visibly antagonizing Putin or incurring his retaliation. Did Trump have something personal on Putin? History will tell."

40) "Putin, as many KGB officers before him, seems to have set out to mistreat a Russia that 'conspired to make him a secret leper' all his life."

See the full 28-page report for more details. centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/upl…