Ex-Soviet intelligence agent: Putin is fearful and capable of the worst

On the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, ex-KGB agent Sergei Zhirnov stunned viewers and no one believed him when he said Russians could use tactical nuclear weapons in war, but Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement 3 days later Putting his atomic arsenal on alert, those worried about this conflict - who knows where it might lead the world - listen carefully to this man.

That is why the French newspaper Le Figaro reviews - in an interview with former intelligence agent Sergei Zhirnov - Guillaume Roquette - the most important excerpts from his new book "L'Engrenage", in which he said that Putin is a frightening man and capable of the worst, especially after he He strategically lost this war, which he thought he would win within a week, by attacking a country long ally of Russia, and entering into an all-out war with 45 million citizens defending their lands and their life choices with incredible courage.

Putin was wrong all along - as Zhirnov says - about the Ukrainians, about their President Volodymyr Zelensky, about the Russian-speaking, about Europe, and about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in his assessment of the reaction of the international community, and even in his assessment of the strategic consequences For this invasion of Russia during the medium and long term.

Unprecedented solitude

When asked about the position of French President Emmanuel Macron - who chose to maintain dialogue with Moscow - the former Soviet intelligence agent said that this position is not clear, and that officials in Poland and Estonia criticized him violently, especially as they see their countries that were under the "yoke" of the former Soviet Union had Putin's next goals will be if he is allowed to do so, and their logic in that is simple that Putin has proven "that he is a war criminal, and therefore no one makes a deal with the devil."

As for US President Joe Biden - as the Poles and Estonians say - he encourages us to take up arms, but he stays away from the battlefield, yet it is necessary to dialogue with the person who could provoke a nuclear war, as the book says.

When asked about his first meeting with Putin, Sergei Zhirnov said that it was in 1980, adding, "We were together in the State Security Committee (the armed arm of the Communist Party), and in the same year we entered the Andropov Institute (the elite school that prepares spies), and it was integrated into the administration. The highest-ranking “X” for the KGB, while Putin was judged unfit for espionage, for not being able to correctly estimate the consequences of his decisions, which was too dangerous for him and for the service, was immediately sent back to Leningrad.

When asked: Is Putin today completely different from the one you knew?

The author replied, "Yes and no, he - on the one hand - venerates the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but on the other hand he is trying to rebuild the great imperial Russia destroyed by Stalin and the KGB of which Putin was a part for almost 30 years."

Zhirnov says that Putin is completely isolated in the Kremlin to an unprecedented extent, especially since his divorce from his wife Lyudmila in 2013, as he no longer tolerates the slightest criticism, and even publicly insulted his intelligence chief, Sergei Narychin, and his closest confidants did not know Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his chief of staff. General Gerasimov decided to declare a state of nuclear alert only on television, even though they should have given the order to launch the nuclear weapon that Putin might give them one day.

Putin - as Zhirnov says - gradually isolated himself from reality, and built a virtual parallel world, "I personally think that he ended up believing in the lies he tells about the Nazi Ukrainians, the Russian army that he thought would win all battles, etc., He is interested in the mark he will make in history, and since last February 21 every decision he made has been worse than the last, and this logic can only lead him to disaster. He is frightening, and he is capable of the worst, that is what his KGB coaches feared when They rejected it; they were right."

world order chaos

Despite all this, Sergei Zhirnov does not see that the Cold War will return, but he fears the harbingers of the birth of chaos in the world order, and perhaps Putin himself is an example of it. He sees Nazis everywhere, but he speaks German and trades with Berlin, and he seems in the recent period less offensive, And if he raises the nuclear threat that could be just a tactic, because he wants to reintegrate the great Russia into the party of nations while putting strong pressure on the rest of the world.

Zhirnov attributed this unstable period in which the world is entering the conditions in which the Soviet Union collapsed, in which the people seemed happy, but the army, intelligence and the very powerful military-industrial complex were not, because of the loss of budgets, manpower and powers by these parties.

Jirnoff concludes by saying: The strange thing in this context is that NATO is not dead, but rather it has evolved and new countries have merged into it. However, Putin, as a former KGB element, is still a scarecrow for the free world, and with the fear he arouses, he has not deterred Finland and Sweden from (thinking V) joining NATO, although that provokes him a lot.