A former top adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama says the United States should have been quicker to recognize a change in Vladimir Putin when he returned to the Kremlin as president in 2012 and more outspoken in confronting his corruption.
In an interview with Current Time, Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama's deputy national security adviser, recalled hours of meetings when Putin did little more than list grievances about topics such as NATO enlargement and actions the Kremlin leader cast as the United States humiliating Russia.
"He would go on and on and on. He'd give these kind of legalistic presentations about how Russia was wronged," said Rhodes, who served eight years in the White House under Obama. "You could sense that this [was] a man motivated by a sense of grievance, and humiliation, and frankly, insecurity in a way," Rhodes said in the interview recorded on February 21.
Rhodes said this signaled that Putin was turning toward "a greater degree of nationalism and autocracy," and that it should have sounded louder alarm bells within the U.S. administration.
"I think we were too slow to see just how different a character he was," said Rhodes, who now writes books, hosts a podcast, and contributes to U.S. broadcaster MSNBC. "We could have been more aware that this was a different character."
Putin wanted to "convey what a strong man he is" and forge an identity of someone who stands up to the United States and other Western countries in a way that he saw as "restoring some lost Russian greatness." He'd been moving in that direction his entire time as a leader of Russia, Rhodes said, but it seemed to accelerate after he returned to the office of president.
The election in 2012 was marked by allegations of fraud and was greeted by protests, including some led by his most vocal opponent, Aleksei Navalny, who died on February 16 in a Russian prison.
Seeing the protests and thinking about his own place in history, Putin came back to the presidency "more aggressive, more belligerent, more surrounded by 'yes' men," Rhodes said.
"All of those things I think have contributed to him being willing to take these kinds of risks that we've seen...above all in Ukraine," said Rhodes, who concurs with other observers of Putin's behavior who believe that a kind of paranoia set in that made it impossible for Putin to "give an inch," fearing that if he did "the whole thing could come crumbling down."
Rhodes said he believes that accounts for the treatment of opposition figures like Navalny, whose death prison authorities said was from natural causes though his Anti-Corruption Foundation said he was murdered. Many Western governments have blamed Putin directly for his death.
Rhodes also acknowledged that people have debated whether the Obama administration should have done more to help Ukraine after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and been more bold about confronting Putin. But he said "the reality of global politics is I'm not sure that any of that would have made a difference…given his psychology."
The most disturbing thing he noticed about Putin, Rhodes said, was that he never got the sense the Russian leader had the ability to empathize with suffering.
Rhodes recalled how the White House would push to get humanitarian aid into some parts of Syria, where war broke out in 2011, and "and there just wasn't any sense that this is a man [who is] able to feel…a degree of empathy for people that are suffering." To Putin, "it was all clinical."
Instead of talking about the people's needs and their suffering, Putin would steer the conversation to "higher levels of geopolitics and history," Rhodes recalled, saying that was unsettling to him.
Putin's inability to feel any empathy for anyone "is probably the tragedy of the whole thing."