Putin puts nuclear weapons on high alert; “may have lost touch with reality” -Expert

Many people are questioning President Vladimir Putin’s sanity after he started an unnecessary war in Ukraine. At least one expert has openly said that the Russian president has “lost touch with reality.” Catherine Belton is an expert on Russian affairs. Ms. Belton has worked as a Moscow-based correspondent for the respected publication, the Financial Times. Catherine Belton now, also, does investigative reporting on Russian matters for the equally respected media network Reuters.

Belton is the author of the widely praised book, “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West.” Ms. Belton, in an interview on Sunday with several correspondents from various international news agencies expressed her observation that the, “President of Russia has been changing over the last two years,” and that he may have finally lost his ability to think rationally. It should be noted that less than an hour after Ms. Belton disclosed her findings, Vladimir Putin escalated an already dangerous situation by ordering Russia’s nuclear weapons to go into a state of high alert, in effect, ordering Russia’s nuclear arsenal to be ready for launch.

Ms. Belton said that Vladimir Putin was once widely viewed as “a cunning, if ruthless, but ultimately rational actor”. However, she said that the Russian president is now isolated and appears to be “increasingly paranoid.” The expert on Russian affairs said, “Putin’s actions this week have come as a great shock. I think many were preparing for him to maybe, yes, recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk [territories that have declared independence from Ukraine] because already, since 2015, de facto they’ve been independent anyway.”

“They were held by separatists backed by the Kremlin, and this was just making a de facto situation de jure. And it would have allowed Putin to kind of walk out. He’s taken yet another little slice of Ukraine. He could continue to perhaps menace from the borders and threaten [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in an attempt to gain concessions from Zelensky and maybe from NATO on missile shields and so on. No one expected him to go this far, and you can see that in the reaction of the Russian stock market, for instance. It lost half its value immediately after the invasion.”

During the interview, the expert said that the Russian president’s action in launching a full-scale and deadly invasion of Ukraine apparently came as a surprise even to Putin’s own advisors. She noted that at one public appearance after the start of the invasion, Putin’s advisors appeared shocked and frightened.

After one correspondent asked Ms. Belton whether this war could lead to the end of Vladimir Putin, she responded in the affirmative, she said, “The stronger resistance that Ukraine can put up, the stronger the resistance from the West will hopefully mean that this is the end, that it is Putin’s Waterloo, and it will lead to his toppling.”

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