'We Need To Talk About Putin' w/ Mark Galeotti

What do we really know about one of the most powerful men in the world after two decades in power?
Putin has been in power for twenty years, but how much have we really learned about him? Why has such a mythology built around him, and why do so many in the West seem so much to want to believe so much of it?
Veteran Russia-watcher Mark Galeotti, London-based author of the recent and much-praised book 'We Need To Talk About Putin' will be in conversation with NUPI's Julie Wilhelmsen about Putin the man, Putin the myth, how observers can try to tell the two apart, and why it matters for policy towards Russia.
In the first chapter of the book, Galeotti writes:
“We need to talk about Putin. We really do. Not just because he is, like it or not, one of the most important people on the planet, and nor because of the impact of the geopolitical struggle he is waging with the West, with bluster and bluff, memes and money. It is also because he has become a global symbol, which everyone defines in their own way. […] he is like a Rorschach inkblot test used by psychologists: the splash of pigment is deliberately ambiguous; what we read into it says more about what is going on in our heads than what is on the paper.”

[Heathcliff Von]

Great lecture. Clear and well reasoned.

[King Kong Kurt]

Very enlightening!

[zhukie]

Mark's description of how the RT journalists are given "suggestions" of what the Kremlin would like to see disseminated at the weekly meetings sound remarkably similar to what has been described as happens at the Murdoch media empire.

[cenc cenc]

wooo, did he call it. well done.

[Markus]

2023: Now we know.. Putin IS Blofeld.

[Vygandas A]

He wasn't farsighted.. :( couldn't imagine the extent of atrocities Putin may commit.

[Quentin Newark]

@Charles Burnham your version is…

[Charles Burnham]

@Quentin Newark probably the worst description of what historians do that I've ever read.

[Quentin Newark]

He is a historian, he looks backwards.

[Jan Marsh]

As I understand it, he said that Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine. Well.....how does he explain things now?

[Richard Knight]

@Toask Which is total fabrication... but then you are a Putin Bot.

[hmmcinerney]

@Toask Which was prior to Russias stealth invasion of Donbas

[Toask]

He didn't anticipate Kiev's escalation of the civil war on the Donbass, prior to Russia's military going in.

[Richard Knight]

The sell by date of this lecture is well over.

[Henry Wyer]

this hasn't aged well

[A2Z]

What is it with some people who bring Brexit into everything , we lost we move on . I vote every election and I have never got the politician I preferred , but I still go to my MPs surgery .

[Vanha Mies]

Galeotti sounds disarmingly naive in 2022. At best.

[Alex H]

Galeotti comparing Brexit to the collapse of the Soviet Union is stupendously stupid.

[Quentin Newark]

@Carl Pierce To join, yes agreed. The lies Heath told us. Until 2016, my parents were spinning in their graves, they thought they were voting to stay in, as they were told, a purely economic arrangement focused on increasing trade.

[Quentin Newark]

@hmmcinerney I could recommend all kinds of equally biased stuff the other way round.

[hmmcinerney]

@Quentin Newark You should watch it, it might change your obvious stance.

[Carl Pierce]

Except it really was wrong and disastrous.

[Quentin Newark]

@hmmcinerney FT is Remainer-Rejoiner Central. Has every interest in painting Brexit as wrong and disastrous. The days of dispassionate factual journalism are gone, if they were ever here. Every news outlet is now activist: arguing a particular view.

[Jo]

Yeah, this didn't age well. Fucking vatnik there!