Since the attack on Ukraine, not a day has gone by without a report about Vladimir Putin. If it's not about his allegedly desolate state of health, old acquaintances speak up. One of them is Sergueï Jirnov. The ex-KGB employee spoke to the AFP news agency not only about the alleged reasons for the attack on the neighbouring country but also about how he assesses the Russian president and his actions.
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Trigger for the war
Moscow's official narrative is that Putin is ordering military action to stop the alleged genocide of Russians inside Ukraine and to ‘denazify’ the country. As per Euractiv, In Putin's own words:
The goal is to protect the people who have been harassed and murdered by the Kyiv regime for eight years. And for this, we will seek the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine and bring to justice those who have committed numerous bloody crimes against the civilian population, including citizens of the Russian Federation.
Sergueï Jirnov, however, classified the attack quite differently. For Putin, the war is above all a means to create a monument for himself, regardless of how it is judged:
I think he wants to go down in history as the biggest bastard and the worst dictator.
Jirnov is no friend of Putin
It seems that the two were not really on the same page at the time. Already at their first meeting, there was allegedly an argument. Jirnov remembered an incident that took place during the Olympic Games in Moscow. At that time, he had spoken in French for too long with another person present. Putin then accused him of acting as a spy for the French. Years later, in his book L'engrenage ('Entanglement'), he hardly had any warm words for his former colleague:
He is Russian like me, but he embodies everything I don't like: cynicism, mendacity, lack of compassion, brutality.
A month ago, in an interview with Welt, he explained why they abruptly parted ways:
We came to the Andropov Institute, the elite school where the spies were trained, in the same year. I was admitted to Section ‘S’, among the ‘illegals’, the most prestigious of the KGB.
Putin, on the other hand, was deemed unfit for the spy service because he was ‘unable to adequately assess the consequences of his decisions’, which was too dangerous for both him and the secret service. He was immediately sorted out and sent back to Leningrad.
In his book he then became even more explicit:
I had before me a man who had failed in his career as a secret agent because he was not intelligent enough, moreover over-ambitious and deluded.
This article is translated from Gentside DE.
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