Veteran U.S. Psychoanalyst Says Putin Isn't As Crazy As Trump

US psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Dekleva, who has been analyzing the psychology of world leaders for the US Department of State for decades, disagrees with analysts who claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin has gone mad after invading Ukraine.

Photo Insert: Vladimir Putin has been tagged as a ruthless and calculating "hostage-taker."

Dekleva said in an interview with Esquire politics editor Jack Holmes that “Putin got some bad intel and is paying the price.”

He added: “I think Putin is the same person. I think he's always been ruthless. I think he's been calculating. He's shown himself to be a disruptor and a risk-taker. I think what happened here is he and his national security team believed intelligence that turned out to be wrong. Had the intelligence been right, then none of these conversations would be happening… This Putin is not new. He's a man in a hurry. I think it's an intelligence failure. I think the wild card in this was that they saw the West as weak. They saw President Biden as weakened. His poll numbers the week before the invasion were 39 percent.”

He added that one other thing that everyone miscalculated, including the Americans and Western leaders, was President Zelensky. Nobody could have predicted his heroism and courage. He was a relative unknown, considered a lightweight, even in Ukrainian politics, even after his election. The Russians missed that. I think they thought he would flee or be toppled.

“With the horrible bombing of civilian targets and even the ecological terrorism, if you will, of bombing that nuclear reactor, the title of war criminal may be added to his other previous titles of diplomat, politician, KGB officer, judo master. He's looking more like the late Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad than like other leaders whom he was compared to earlier in his career,” Dekleva stressed.

Dekleva told Holmes the world should pay attention to Putin’s escalating rhetoric on the use of nuclear weapons. “I think we should pay attention to it. We have to be careful not to overreact to it, but we should pay attention.

He's basically letting America and the West know, hey, I'm a nuclear power, which he is. In this sense, the war is a combination of a war and a hostage situation where Putin is the hostage-taker. He's using brutal tactics of fear by talking about nuclear weapons and the attack on the reactor. That's frightening because my guess is that’s deliberate.”

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