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- From tough guy to madman: How Ukraine war eroded Putin’s image
From tough guy to madman: How Ukraine war eroded Putin’s image
Shunned from all major international summits and forums, including G20, Putin has attempted to build his own anti-Western coalition
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![Russian then-prime minister Vladimir Putin is pictured with a horse during his vacation outside the town of Kyzyl in Southern Siberia.](https://cdn.i24news.tv/uploads/a8/42/91/5f/ef/d8/f2/93/06/d7/ec/3f/6b/b2/fc/98/a842915fefd8f29306d7ec3f6bb2fc98.jpg?width=1000)
Putin’s public image both inside and outside Russia has changed dramatically since the beginning of the Ukraine war. From being perceived as a strong leader who has a way of pushing his agenda and making world powers listen he became an outcast of international politics. Western leaders talk about Putin in an increasingly surreal context of killing presidents and bombarding prime ministers with missiles. Regular Russians mock him over pictures of meetings behind a ridiculously long table in his “bunker,” while even pro-war voters criticize the president for not visiting the frontlines like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Falling out with the world
The “tough guy” once admired by the European right-wing public turned into a dangerous and unreasonable opponent. France’s President Emmanuel Macron who spent nearly 100 hours on the phone with Putin in the first months of the war, received a wave of criticism for saying that the Russian leader shouldn't’ be “humiliated'' by the West over his “historic mistake” but soon gave up on attempts to build a dialogue with Putin, who is “lying to himself.”
![Michal Cizek / AFP](https://cdn.i24news.tv/uploads/58/38/66/5a/04/58/66/c9/5d/8a/f9/54/cc/1a/c4/7f/5838665a045866c95d8af954cc1ac47f.jpg?width=750)
Even Russia’s most loyal supporter in Europe, Serbia, has recently fallen out with Moscow over the recruitment of mercenaries among Serbs by Russia’s private military Wagner Group, run by Putin’s “cook” Evgeniy Prigozhin. Another long-standing European partner of Russia, Germany, also turned its back on Putin slamming his “energy blackmail” over gas supply cuts and agreeing to deploy tanks to Ukraine.
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Shunned from all major international summits and forums, including G20, Putin has attempted to build his own anti-Western coalition. Notably his last foreign trip before the invasion was to China in early February. The next one came only late June - the president visited Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, then Iran in July, Uzbekistan in September, Kazakhstan in October, Armenia in November, Kirgizia and Belarus in December.
Apart from Iran - all these trips were to former Soviet states, which speaks about the growing isolation not only in the West, but apparently among Russia’s traditional allies in Asia and Latin America. Although the BRICS states (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) did not join international sanctions against Moscow, they were not particularly supportive of it either.
![AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic](https://cdn.i24news.tv/uploads/62/af/29/33/90/6a/6c/c7/ec/ef/6c/b9/04/c5/2d/f4/62af2933906a6cc7ecef6cb904c52df4.jpg?width=750)
China did declare general support for Russia but did not back the invasion, on the one hand criticizing Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and on the other pointing fingers at the U.S. for pumping Ukraine with weapons and thus prolonging the conflict. Despite Putin’s visionary idea of building a “multipolar world,” where countries like Russia and China will oppose “America’s dictatorship,” Beijing is seemingly trying to distance itself from the war with senior officials on condition of anonymity telling the media that “Putin is crazy” for starting it.
While other alleged leaders of the multipolar world, India and Turkey, meet with Putin quite amicably, they are balancing it out by directly telling the Russian president off for the war, which a year ago would’ve been hard to imagine.
“I know that today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this,” Modi told Putin on the sidelines of September’s Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Uzbekistan.
This sentiment of frustration with Putin for starting the large-scale invasion apparently without warning any of his close allies is also felt in the ex-Soviet Union countries. Armenia is growing publicly displeased with Moscow over its lack of action in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan and refused to host Russian-led military exercises this year.
Kazakhstan’s new president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, whose name Putin notably continues to mispronounce during their public meetings, also stated his country’s position firmly, when he declared that Astana does not recognize the self-proclaimed independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, annexed by Russia. Putin has essentially become toxic even for his closest allies.
Falling out with Russia
The war took away quite a few things that Putin seemed to enjoy personally - major sporting events after which he awarded Russian athletes at the Kremlin, making world leaders, including the Pope and the British Queen, wait for hours for his arrival, and even going on vacations around Russia posing for extravagant photos that used to circulate in world media. And that’s not to mention all the sanctioned property that independent investigators attribute to the Russian president and his inner circle.
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The reason for the Russian president “hiding” from his citizens goes beyond the growing discontent with the partial mobilization that he declared in September or intensifying political repressions. For all we know, the Russian president is not particularly sensitive to public opinion as anyone who criticizes governmental decisions in his eyes automatically becomes a “foreign agent” or a “traitor of his motherland.”
However, as Putin’s rhetoric towards his international partners, now labeled as “unfriendly countries” changed, his way of communicating with the Russian public changed as well. Another thing that Russia’s president was known for was his love for ritual public events like Direct Line with Vladimir Putin (hours-long Q&A with ordinary Russians broadcast on national TV), his annual press conference and his address to the Federal Assembly. These were signs of stability that were the cornerstone of Putin’s political program for the last 22 years. The president prided himself on bringing stability to the country as opposed to the “chaotic 1990s” that he took every chance to condemn in his public speeches.
![Sergei GUNEYEV / POOL / AFP](https://cdn.i24news.tv/uploads/b4/7f/29/2a/69/e7/d3/e5/b5/89/a9/e5/d6/53/24/5b/b47f292a69e7d3e5b589a9e5d653245b.jpg?width=750)
None of these events were held in 2022 for the first time in nearly two decades, signaling to Putin’s audience that something was wrong more than speculations about the president’s health, both physical and mental, which peaked during the war. Could it be that Putin is afraid of his own people? Or so preoccupied with the war that he doesn’t want to waste time on public appearances? Whichever it is, the growing isolation of the Russian president is becoming evident even inside the country that he put at stake in his fight against the West.