SLOVIANSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces withdrew from a strategic Black Sea island Thursday, potentially easing the threat to the vital Ukrainian port city of Odesa, but kept up their push to encircle the last stronghold of resistance in the eastern province of Luhansk.

The Kremlin portrayed the pullout from Snake Island as a “goodwill gesture.” But Ukraine’s military claimed it forced the Russians to flee in two small speedboats following a barrage of Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes. The exact number of troops was not disclosed.

“Unable to withstand the impact of our artillery, missile and aviation units, the Russian occupiers have left Snake Island. The Odesa region is completely liberated,” the Ukrainian military said in its regular social media update Thursday evening.

A senior Ukrainian military official, Oleksiy Gromov, earlier said Kyiv was planning to deploy troops to Snake Island, but did not specify a timeline.

“At the moment, we control (the island) with the help of our weapons: long-range artillery, rocket units and aviation,” Gromov said.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the withdrawal was intended to demonstrate that Moscow isn’t hampering U.N. efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor for exporting agricultural products from Ukraine.

Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of blockading Ukrainian ports to prevent exports of grain, contributing to a global food crisis. Russia has denied that and said Ukraine needs to remove mines from the Black Sea to allow safe navigation.

Turkey has sought to broker a deal to unblock grain exports. But the talks have dragged on, with Kyiv expressing fear that Russia will exploit the removal of the mines to attack Odesa.

Snake Island sits along a busy shipping lane. Russia took control of it in the opening days of the war in the apparent hope of using it as a staging ground for an assault on Odesa.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that although the pullout did not guarantee the Black Sea region’s safety, it would “significantly limit” Russian activities there.

“Step by step, we will push (Russia) out of our sea, our land, our sky,” he said in his nightly address.

It was unclear if the evacuation of Snake Island meant a change in Moscow’s designs on Ukraine’s biggest port, which is crucial for shipping grain to Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. It’s also the headquarters of the country’s navy.

The island — shrouded in myth since ancient times — early on took on legendary significance for Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion, when Ukrainian troops there reportedly received a demand from a Russian warship to surrender or be bombed. The answer supposedly came back, “Go (expletive) yourself.”

Ukraine has celebrated the story with patriotic fervor, issuing a postage stamp in commemoration.

The island’s Ukrainian defenders were captured by the Russians but later freed as part of a prisoner exchange. After the island was taken, the Ukrainian military heavily bombarded the small Russian garrison there and its air defenses.

At a NATO summit in Madrid, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson billed the Russian pullout as a sign that Ukraine will prevail in the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In the end it will prove impossible for Putin to hold down a country that will not accept” occupation, Johnson said.

Meanwhile, Moscow kept up its push to take control of the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. It is focused on the city of Lysychansk, the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in Luhansk province.

Russian troops and their separatist allies control 95% of Luhansk and about half of Donetsk, the two provinces that make up the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas.

Ukraine said the Russians were shelling Lysychansk and clashing with Ukrainian defenders around an oil refinery on its edges.

The Ukrainian military said Thursday evening that Russia had seen “partial success” that day around the plant, some 17 kilometers south-west of the city. They made no reference to claims that attacking forces had been able to cross the strategic Siverskiy Donets river and enter the city from the north.

Zelenskyy said in his nightly address that the situation in the Donbas remained “the toughest and extremely difficult.”

Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said Russian reconnaissance units trying to enter Lysychansk on Wednesday were repelled. He said the Russians were trying to block a highway used to deliver supplies, and fully encircle the city.

“The Russians have thrown practically all their forces to seize the city,” Haidai said, but denied that Lysychansk had been encircled.

Nevertheless, Haidai noted that as of Thursday evening, evacuations from the city were impossible due to heavy shelling and mined access roads. Earlier, the Ukrainian military said it was not planning a retreat from Lysychansk.

A representative of Russia-backed separatists in Luhansk claimed that pro-Russian forces entered Lysychansk Thursday, after a perilous river crossing — which, if true, would be a significant development.

Military analysts previously told the AP that Russian forces had little chance of crossing the river without major losses due to the defenders’ elevated positions.

It was impossible to immediately verify the accuracy of the statements by Andrey Marochko, who heads the armed forces of the self-proclaimed, unrecognized separatist territory, to Russia’s Interfax agency. There was no official confirmation from Moscow or Kyiv.

In other developments:

—Ukraine’s president hailed the launch Thursday of Ukrainian electricity exports to E.U. member state Romania, which Zelenskyy called “only the first stage” of a process that may see “a significant part” of the Russian gas consumed by Europeans replaced by Ukrainian energy.

—- U.S. President Joe Biden said his administration will send an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, including rockets and advanced air defense systems. In his nightly address, Zelenskyy thanked Biden for the move, saying that the equipment soon “will go to the frontline to work for Ukraine, to defend freedom.”

— Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who held talks with Putin on Thursday a day after visiting Ukraine, said he handed the Russian leader a letter from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He did not elaborate.

— A senior Russian official warned that Moscow could consider Western sanctions as a cause for war. “Under certain circumstances, such hostile measures could be perceived … even as a casus belli,” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said in a speech at a legal forum.

— Speaking on a visit to Turkmenistan on Thursday, Putin said his goals in Ukraine haven’t changed since the start of the war. He said they were “the liberation of the Donbas, the protection of these people and the creation of conditions that would guarantee the security of Russia itself.” He made no mention of his original stated goals to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine. “As you can see, the troops are moving and reaching the marks that were set for them for a certain stage of this combat work. Everything is going according to plan,” Putin said.

— Funerals were scheduled Thursday for some of the 18 people confirmed killed in a Russian airstrike Monday on a busy shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk. Crews searched the rubble for 20 still missing.

— Sweden announced plans to send more military aid to Ukraine, including anti-tank weapons and mine-clearing equipment. Sweden was invited this week to join NATO, a process that could take months.

— Iranian state media said Thursday Iran has proposed expanding financial exchanges with Russia and cooperating in the energy field. Both countries are under heavy Western sanctions. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Putin met on the sidelines of a summit in Turkmenistan.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Published: 16:49 BST, 30 June 2022 | Updated: 16:56 BST, 30 June 2022

You’ve seen the headlines. You’ve maybe even quoted them, especially now that it’s election season. “Conservatives More Susceptible to Bullshit Than Liberals.” “Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?” “Studies: Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from Venus.” All of these tantalizing connections between personalities and politics sound academic if not downright scientific—they cite studies, after all—and, depending on your own political leanings, you’ve likely had one of two reactions: Of course, I knew it! or This is bogus! As it turns out, if you’re in the second camp you’re probably right—but maybe for a reason that’s different from what you thought.

For many political psychologists, it seems abundantly clear that traits and politics go together. There’s evidence that many aspects of personality develop quite early in life and have a genetic component, but we don’t become actively political until we are older. So it’s sensible to assume that the one might have some bearing on the other. But most of the work on the subject in the past decades has consisted merely of scientists conducting surveys and observing correlations. Few researchers have ever asked whether what they’re seeing actually implies causality or if the correlations are even meaningful. (The fact that correlation does not equal causation has been amply illustrated by a self-styled correlation debunker, Tyler Vigen; a recent visit to his eponymous Web site shows a 0.998 regional correlation between U.S. spending on science and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.) And so, almost a decade ago, Brad Verhulst, a behavioral geneticist now at Virginia Commonwealth University, asked himself just that: Is the personality-politics link truly causal? A relationship between personality and political leanings is “a completely reasonable thing to expect,” he told me when we spoke recently. He wanted to use his knowledge as a geneticist to explore the causal linkage that he was certain would be there.

He found something quite different. “Unfortunately, the empirical evidence doesn’t seem to support that strong causal hypothesis,” he said. In an analysis of 28,877 people from the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry (known as the Virginia 30,000), and then in a second, separate longitudinal study that followed a group of more than eight thousand twins and siblings for ten years, he found no evidence of any form of causation. Instead, he found a relationship that was more complicated. It is far more likely that politics and personality traits are both influenced by some earlier genetic and environmental factors. In other words, they may indeed be related, but the fact that someone is liberal does not make him more tolerant, for instance, just as being tolerant does not make someone liberal.

In the first sample (the Virginia 30,000) Verhulst and his collaborators found that, while some modest correlations did exist between certain traits and attitudes—for example, between conservative economic views and measures of neuroticism—there was no evidence that there was anything causal to the correlations. But genetic analyses can be tricky. So Verhulst and Peter Hatemi tried a longitudinal study: follow people over time, map their personality and political leanings, and see if changes in the one cause changes in the other. They looked at two samples, one of adults (7,610 twins and siblings who were between the ages of nineteen and seventy-eight in 1980) and one of adolescents (1,061 twins and siblings who were between sixteen and nineteen in 1998). Each group had been tested in two waves, ten years apart. At both points, researchers looked at political attitudes (views on topics such as abortion and gay marriage, as well as responses to statements such as “I believe we should look to our religious authorities for decisions on moral issues”) and personality measures. They found that personality did shift over time—not by huge amounts, but perceptibly. People could become more or less extroverted, more agreeable or conscientious, or any number of things. Political attitudes were slightly more stable, among both the adolescents and the adults: people who were conservative tended to stay conservative. And, most important, changes in personality did not predict changes in politics. “We conclude that both personality traits and political attitudes are independently part of one’s psychological architecture,” the authors write.

None of this work denies the possible existence of correlations between some traits and some beliefs, but it does raise the question of what those correlations signify—especially since, setting aside the issue of causality, some early research on politics and personality may have overstated the connections because of a built-in tautology. As it turns out, in many of the early conceptions of personality traits political leanings were purposefully built into the survey questions used to assess personality. Early theorists explicitly wanted to capture political attitudes with their scales. For instance, in order to measure “openness,” Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, the creators of one of the most widely used personality measures, the NEO-PI-R, use “favors conservative values” as one of the items to assess the degree to which someone possesses a trait. In measures of agreeableness, there are items like “we can never do too much for the poor and elderly” and “human need should always take priority over economic considerations”—both statements that are embedded in a specific political ideology. In other words, our political beliefs are actually used to assess our level of the trait. By definition, we are higher on openness, say, if we are politically liberal.

That circularity, however, is often lost on modern minds. So what happens when we look for correlations between, say, openness and liberalism? We find one because it’s largely tautological. It doesn’t help that most of the scales are proprietary and, hence, not publicly available: it’s hard to find a list of items that contribute to each facet and, therefore, to see for yourself just how embedded politics already are in traits that people mainly think of as abstract concepts.

When I asked Verhulst if it was possible to circumvent this, he pointed out two things: first, not all traits are tautological (openness is the most egregious example). If you wanted to study risk-taking, for instance, you could conceivably avoid any sort of circularity. And, second, some people try to remove the political items—but with mixed results. “If you are concerned with political attitudes, you might remove items that are explicitly political,” he told me. “But just because you’ve taken those out doesn’t mean you’ve fundamentally changed what openness measures. Even if you’re removing some of the completely tautological items, you aren’t quite hitting that problem.” So in his studies Verhulst also used an entirely different scale, one that is “relatively untainted by explicitly political items,” as he and his co-authors write. The non-causal correlations he does find are in the weak 0.2–0.4 range. (A perfect correlation is 1; 0.2 is considered “negligible,” while 0.4 is “low.”)

But the desire for causality, or at least some basic truths—Of course those Republicans are closed-minded people! Of course those damn Democrats are neurotic!—persists. And despite studies like Verhulst’s, we can’t seem to let it go. Headlines keep appearing; researchers keep pointing it out. Verhulst’s 2012 paper—the analysis of the Virginia 30,000—was recently in the news because of an authorial correction. It seems that one of the minor correlational directions had been reversed: it was liberals, not conservatives, who scored slightly higher on a measure of psychoticism, which takes into account aggressiveness, antisocial tendencies, and egocentricity, among other traits. (“Science Says Liberals, Not Conservatives, Are Psychotic,” the New York Post wrote.) In the correction note, Verhulst, Hatemi, and a co-author, Lindon Eaves, stressed that the error, while regrettable and sloppy, didn’t actually affect any of the paper’s main conclusions: that there was no causality between personality and politics, and that correlations were small. Really, neither liberals nor conservatives are particularly likely to display traits of psychoticism, and, to the extent that liberals are, it’s no more related to their politics than to their shirt size. “We found no evidence that personality traits play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes,” the authors write. “Our focus and novel results showed that whatever the directions of the correlations are between personality traits and attitudes, the relationships are spurious.” And so, while it of course needed to be fixed, at the end of the day it didn’t matter all that much.

Note: The content of this page is available with proper page margins and padding at http://personality-politics.org/russia for improved readability.

March 14, 2022 — USPP releases updated threat assessment

Scroll to the bottom of this page or the http://personality-politics.org/russia page for an updated threat assessment in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Political Personality of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. Working paper, Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics, January 2017. Abstract and link for full-text (38 pages; PDF) download at Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/104/

The Personality Profile of Russian President

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

(Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин)

Aubrey Immelman

Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics

March 2014

A remotely conducted empirical psychological assessment of Russian leader Vladimir Putin is currently in progress, using the third edition of the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with DSM-IV.

Informal observation suggests that Putin is a highly dominant leader. However, more systematic observation is required to establish whether he is an introvert or an extravert.

If Putin is a dominant introvert, which appears to be the case [confirmed 7/30/2014], the following personality-based leadership profile would apply:

In terms of Lloyd Etheredge’s (1978) fourfold typology of personality-based foreign policy role orientations, which locates policymakers on the dimensions of dominance–submission and introversion–extraversion, high-dominance introverts (in American politics, presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover) are quite willing to use military force, tending

to divide the world, in their thought, between the moral values they think it ought to exhibit and the forces opposed to this vision. They tend to have a strong, almost Manichean, moral component to their views. They tend to be described as stubborn and tenacious. They seek to reshape the world in accordance with their personal vision, and their foreign policies are often characterized by the tenaciousness with which they advance one central idea. … [These leaders] seem relatively preoccupied with themes of exclusion, the establishment of institutions or principles to keep potentially disruptive forces in check. (p. 449; italics in original)

Etheredge’s high-dominance introvert is similar in character to Margaret Hermann’s (1987) expansionist orientation to foreign affairs. These leaders have a view of the world as being “divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’” based on a belief system in which conflict is viewed as inherent in the international system. This world view prompts a personal political style characterized by a “wariness of others’ motives” and a directive, controlling interpersonal orientation, resulting in a foreign policy “focused on issues of security and status,” favoring “low-commitment actions” and espousing “short-term, immediate change in the international arena.” Expansionist leaders “are not averse to using the ‘enemy’ as a scapegoat” and their rhetoric often may be “hostile in tone” (pp. 168–169).

References

Etheredge, L. S. (1978). Personality effects on American foreign policy, 1898–1968: A test of interpersonal generalization theory. American Political Science Review, 72, 434–451.

Hermann, M. G. (1987). Assessing the foreign policy role orientations of sub-Saharan African leaders. In S. G. Walker (Ed.), Role theory and foreign policy analysis (pp. 161–198). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pilot Study — April 25, 2014

Click on image for larger view

Full Study — July 30, 2014

Following additional data collection by summer research fellow Joe Trenzeluk during the months of June and July, the psychological assessment of Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been completed. The next phase of the study, to be conducted during the month of August, will be to elaborate on Putin’s leadership style, employing his personality profile as a temporally and cross-situationally stable framework for anticipating his future political behavior.

Click on image for larger view

Joe Trenzeluk presents his research on “The personality profile of Russian president Vladimir Putin” at the Undergraduate Research Poster Session, Great Hall, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minn., Aug. 6, 2014.

Research report — January 5, 2017

The Political Personality Personality of Russian Federation President

Vladimir Putin

(Владимир Путин)

Aubrey Immelman and Joseph V. Trenzeluk

Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics

January 2017

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an indirect assessment of the personality of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, from the conceptual perspective of personologist Theodore Millon.

Psychodiagnostically relevant data regarding President Putin was extracted from open-source intelligence and synthesized into a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with Axis II of DSM-IV.

The personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed on the basis of interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality Styles manuals. Putin’s primary personality patterns were found to be Dominant/controlling (a measure of aggression or hostility), Ambitious/self-serving (a measure of narcissism), and Conscientious/dutiful, with secondary Retiring/reserved (introverted) and Dauntless/adventurous (risk-taking) tendencies and lesser Distrusting/suspicious features. The blend of primary patterns in Putin’s profile constitutes a composite personality type aptly described as an expansionist hostile enforcer.

Dominant individuals enjoy the power to direct others and to evoke obedience and respect; they are tough and unsentimental and often make effective leaders. This personality pattern comprises the “hostile” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Ambitious individuals are bold, competitive, and self-assured; they easily assume leadership roles, expect others to recognize their special qualities, and often act as though entitled. This personality pattern delineates the “expansionist” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Conscientious individuals are dutiful and diligent, with a strong work ethic and careful attention to detail; they are adept at crafting public policy but often lack the retail political skills required to consummate their policy objectives and are more technocratic than visionary. This personality pattern fashions the “enforcer” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Retiring (introverted) individuals tend not to develop strong ties to others, are somewhat deficient in the ability to recognize the needs or feelings of others, and may lack spontaneity and interpersonal vitality.

Dauntless individuals are adventurous, individualistic, daring personalities resistant to deterrence and inclined to take calculated risks.

Putin’s major personality-based strengths in a political role are his commanding demeanor and confident assertiveness. His major personality-based shortcomings are his uncompromising intransigence, lack of empathy and congeniality, and cognitive inflexibility.

Full-text download » http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/104/

Research presentation — April 30, 2022

Abby Goff presents her research poster on “The Post-Expansionist Profile of Russian President Vladimir Putin” at the Minnesota Undergraduate Psychology Conference, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, April 30, 2022.

Click on image for larger view

Related reports

Putin Should Prepare Himself for Clinton (Joe Trenzeluk, St. Cloud Times, June 28, 2014) — The past few months have sparked heated debate regarding President Obama’s handling of foreign policy, specifically the crisis in Ukraine and his negotiations, or lack thereof, with Vladimir Putin. … Political-psychological studies suggest that putative 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton may be better suited than Obama to deal with Putin. … Full report

Profile Hints at Putin Mindset (Joe Trenzeluk, St. Cloud Times, August 3, 2014) — On July 17, 298 innocent victims were killed when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine. As attempts to investigate the incident continue, international pressure has been placed on Russian President Vladimir Putin because it is believed the Russian military supplied Ukrainian pro-Russia separatists with the Buk surface-to-air missiles that downed the airliner. … Full report

The Many Faces of Vladimir Putin: A Political Psychology Profile (Kenneth Dekleva, The Cipher, January 22, 2017) — Many profiles of Putin have missed the mark, labeling him as a “thug” or seeing him as a mere tool of larger, more intricate power structures or groupings, such as the siloviki, Russia’s military, law-enforcement, and intelligence communities. Such analyses of Putin’s political behavior have at times led to a lack of predictive power regarding Russia’s actions or to heightened emotional predictions of a new Cold War or military conflict between Russia and the West. … Full report

SIDEBAR

The CIA’s secret psychological profiles of dictators and world leaders are amazing: Psychoanalyzing strongmen, from Castro to Saddam (Dave Gilson, Mother Jones, Feb. 11, 2015) — Last week, Politico and USA Today reported about a secret 2008 Pentagon study which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s defining characteristic is … autism. The Office of Net Assessment’s Body Leads project asserted that scrutinizing hours of Putin footage revealed “that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality … identified by leading neuroscientists as Asperger’s Syndrome, an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions.” Putin’s spokesman dismissed the claim as “stupidity not worthy of comment.” But it was far from the first time the intelligence community has tried to diagnose foreign leaders from afar on behalf of American politicians and diplomats. The CIA has a long history of crafting psychological and political profiles of international figures, with varying degrees of depth and accuracy. … Full story

Updated Threat Assessment

March 20, 2022

On February 25, 2022 – the day after Russia invaded Ukraine – U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a member of the “Gang of Eight” in Congress with access to the most sensitive classified intelligence information, tweeted, “I wish I could share more, but for now I can say it’s pretty obvious to many that something is off with #Putin. … It would be a mistake to assume this Putin would react the same way he would have 5 years ago.”

Rubio denied that his tweet referenced classified assessments of Vladimir Putin’s mental state by U.S. intelligence agencies; however, questions regarding Putin’s mental stability were reinforced by contemporaneous statements made by other public figures with past connections to the intelligence community.

For example, on February 27, Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, said on Fox News Sunday that Putin “seems erratic,” with “an ever deepening, delusional rendering of history.”

Concurrently, Fox News reported that James Clapper, former national intelligence director in the Obama administration, “echoed Rice’s assessment,” telling CNN Putin was “unhinged” and that he was worried about Putin’s “acuity and balance,” given that he has his finger on the nuclear trigger.

Furthermore, an unnamed “senior national security official” under former U.S. president Donald Trump told Fox News that when Putin met with French president Emmanuel Macron in February, “he seemed ‘paranoid.’ ”

Finally, for a contrary point of view, Fox News quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst Rebekah Koffler, author of Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, as saying: “Putin is absolutely not crazy. … He’s not delusional, there are no mental anomalies. … Putin is a cold-blooded, typical Russian autocratic leader and a very calculated risk-taker. He’s simply executing a plan that he has been hatching for 20 years.”

Koffler’s analysis is congruent with the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics’s (USPP) psychological profile of Putin. Moreover, her analysis aligns with Virginia Commonwealth University’s Wilder School of Government & Public Affairs assistant professor Benjamin R. Young’s exposition of Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” worldview, published in Foreign Policy on (March 6, 2022). Following is a summary of these two perspectives.

What is Putin’s personality profile and has it changed in the recent past?

A study conducted at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics in 2014 may be summarized as follows:

Putin’s primary personality patterns were found to be Dominant/controlling (a measure of aggression or hostility), Ambitious/self-serving (a measure of narcissism), and Conscientious/dutiful, with secondary Retiring/reserved (introverted) and Dauntless/adventurous (risk-taking) tendencies and lesser Distrusting/suspicious features. The blend of primary patterns in Putin’s profile constitutes a composite personality type aptly described as an expansionist hostile enforcer.

Dominant individuals enjoy the power to direct others and to evoke obedience and respect; they are tough and unsentimental and often make effective leaders. This personality pattern encapsulates the “hostile” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Ambitious individuals are bold, competitive, and self-assured; they easily assume leadership roles, expect others to recognize their special qualities, and often act as though entitled. This personality pattern reveals the “expansionist” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Conscientious individuals are dutiful and diligent, with a strong work ethic and careful attention to detail; they are adept at crafting public policy but often lack the retail political skills required to consummate their policy objectives and are more technocratic than visionary. This personality pattern fashions the “enforcer” component of Putin’s personality composite.

Retiring (introverted) individuals tend not to develop strong ties to others, are somewhat deficient in the ability to recognize the needs or feelings of others, and may lack spontaneity and interpersonal vitality.

Dauntless individuals are adventurous, individualistic, daring personalities resistant to deterrence and inclined to take calculated risks.

In theory, one would not expect any significant changes to Putin’s personality profile as assessed in 2014 because personality, by definition, refers to the ways a person’s thoughts (cognitions), emotions/feelings (affects), behaviors (actions), and mode of relating to others are stable over time and consistent over situations (i.e., temporal stability and cross-situational consistency).

However, it is possible for personality functioning – perhaps due to prolonged social isolation or chronic psychological stressors – to become compromised (decompensated) over time, shading into the sphere of mental illness.

For the purpose of risk assessment, plausible (though hypothetical) comorbidities of Putin’s primary personality patterns are outlined below:

MIDC Scale 1A: The Dominant Pattern

According to Theodore Millon (2011), Dominant (Assertive–Denigrating–Sadistic spectrum) personality types are notably predisposed to syndromes of a paranoidlike character: “Delusional disorders may occur owing to life’s circumstances that force the sadist into patterns of social withdrawal, and these may lead, in turn, to fixed ideas of a delusional nature.” (p. 646)

MIDC Scale 2: The Ambitious Pattern

According to Millon (2011), Ambitious (Confident–Egotistic–Narcissistic spectrum) personality types “may decompensate into paranoid disorders. Owing to their excessive use of fantasy mechanisms, they are disposed to misinterpret events and to construct delusional beliefs. Unwilling to accept constraints on their independence and unable to accept the viewpoints of others, narcissists may isolate themselves from the corrective effects of shared thinking. Alone, they may ruminate and weave their beliefs into a network of fanciful and totally invalid suspicions.” (pp. 407–408)

MIDC Scale 6: The Conscientious Pattern

According to Millon (2011), “the frequency of co-morbidity is perhaps the lowest” among Conscientious (Reliable–Constricted–Compulsive spectrum) personality types and “tends to be fairly circumscribed when compared with other personality disorders.” (p. 508)

Formulation

Two of Putin’s primary personality patterns delusional syndromes as potential comorbidities. A delusion may be defined as a false belief that is impervious to reason. In the context of political leadership, it may be instructive to examine potential delusional thinking on the part of Putin’s as a preexisting vulnerability rooted in his political ideology or, more specifically his worldview. In that regard, Young’s description of Putin’s view of the world is enlightening.

Putin’s Russkiy Mir worldview

According to Benjamin Young (2022),

Putin believes an invasion of Ukraine is a righteous cause and necessary for the dignity of the Russian civilization, which he sees as being genetically and historically superior to other Eastern European identities. The idea of protecting Russian-speakers in Eurasia has been a key part of Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” worldview and 21st-century Russian identity. Under the rubric of Russkiy Mir (Russian World), Putin’s government promotes the idea that Russia is not a mere nation-state but a civilization-state that has an important role to play in world history.

In 1997, Russian post-liberal, neo-fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin, later an advisor to Putin, published his foundational book, Foundations of Geopolitics. Referred to as Putin’s Rasputin, Dugin argues that the world order is shaped by competition between Sea Powers (Atlanticists), such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU countries, and Land Powers (Eurasianists), such as Russia.

Dugin argues that Russia’s geopolitical position weakened after the collapse of the Soviet Union and that invasions of Georgia and Ukraine were necessary for tilting the world system back in Moscow’s favor. For Dugin, an invasion of Ukraine was the most important part of this civilizational battle between the sea-faring Atlanticists and the land power Eurasianists. “Ukraine, as an independent state with some territorial ambitions, poses a huge danger to the whole of Eurasia, and without solving the Ukrainian problem, it makes no sense to talk about continental geopolitics,” Dugin explained in his 1997 book. While Dugin’s closeness to Putin’s inner circle has varied throughout time, his ideas have permeated within elite Russian political and military circles. The recent invasion of Ukraine is a continuation of a Dugin-promoted strategy for weakening the international liberal order.

Along with Duginism, the Kremlin has circulated the ideas of Russkiy Mir within Russian media and civic society. Putin first publicly mentioned the term Russkiy Mir in 2001 at the first World Congress of Russian Compatriots Living Abroad. He said, “The notion of the Russian World extends far from Russia’s geographical borders and even far from the borders of the Russian ethnicity.” Revanchism and a belief in the sacred role of the Russian civilization in world history have become the defining element of 21st-century Russian identity. …

For Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an ideological calamity not because he holds any torch for communism itself but because it spiritually distanced Russian-speakers from their motherland. … For a patriotic ideologue such as Putin, this separation of Russophones from their motherland was an existential threat to the survival of the great Russian civilization.

For the last 20 years, Putin has sought closer ties with Russophone “compatriots” in former Soviet republics and has occasionally used the concept of Russkiy Mir to justify the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In the Russkiy Mir worldview, Ukraine plays a special role. It is the cornerstone of Russian civilization and culture. … For the Kremlin, without a Russophone Ukraine, there is no Russian World.

Formulation

Considering that Putin has subscribed to the “Russkiy Mir” worldview for at least two decades, his political cognition appears to be more an obsession embedded in his Conscientious personality pattern than a delusion comorbid with his Dominant and Ambitious personality patterns. Stated differently, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may be viewed more as compulsion driven than delusional or “paranoidal.”

Person–Situation Interaction

There is no direct cause–effect relationship between personality and political behavior; behavior is a function of the internal dispositions of the person (including their ideological predispositions, worldview, personality traits, attitudes, and values) interacting with the external environment, or situation, which – following field theorist Kurt Lewin – may be summarized with the notation B = f(P × S).

Thus, it would be a mistake to attribute Putin’s actions exclusively to personological determinants (P) of political behavior (B). Based in research conducted at the USPP, it is plausible that a significant situational determinant (S) – effectively, a precipitating variable – of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is the transition from the administration of Donald Trump (the most aggressive and least accommodating U.S. president studied under the auspices of the USPP in the past three decades) to that of Joe Biden (the least aggressive, most accommodating/conciliatory president). If, indeed, Putin’s political calculus was informed by his perception of the current occupant of the White House as a risk-averse, conciliatory, nonconfrontational commander-in-chief, that perception could have been reinforced by the fiasco of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Empirical findings

According to Griebie and Immelman (2021), Joe Biden’s score of 3 on Scale 1A (Dominant) — a measure of aggressiveness — is the lowest score obtained by any major-party presidential candidate in the seven election cycles since 1996. In descending order of magnitude, the Scale 1A elevations of major-party presidential nominees studied at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics are: Donald Trump, 22 (2016, 2020; Immelman, 2016b); Hillary Clinton, 21 (2016; Immelman, 2016a); Bob Dole, 21 (1996; Immelman, 1998a); George W. Bush, 11 (2000; Immelman, 2002); John McCain, 10 (2008; Immelman, 2007); Al Gore, 8 (2000; Immelman, 1998b); Mitt Romney, 8 (2012; Immelman, 2012); Bill Clinton, 7 (1996; Immelman, 1998a); Barack Obama, 7 (2008, 2012; Immelman, 2010); John Kerry, 6 (2004; Immelman & Beatty, 2005); Joe Biden, 3 (2020; Griebie & Immelman, 2020).

Moreover, Griebie and Immelman (2021) note that Joe Biden’s score of 9 on MIDC scale 4 (Accommodating) — a measure of agreeableness — compares as follows with recent U.S. presidents: Barack Obama, 5 (Immelman, 2010); Bill Clinton, 5 (Immelman, 1998a); George W. Bush, 4 (Immelman, 2002); Donald Trump, 0 (Immelman, 2016b; Immelman & Griebie, 2020).

What if … Rubio and others are correct that Putin is “off,” “paranoid,” or “unhinged”?

Christopher S. Chivvis, a former U.S. intelligence official for Europe, recently wrote that “scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies” all projected that Mr. Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West. (Max Fisher, “As Russia digs in, what’s the risk of nuclear War? The New York Times, March 16, 2022)

As political scientist Betty Glad wrote in a 2002 Political Psychology article titled “Why tyrants go too far: Malignant narcissism and absolute power”:

[A]bsolute power, paradoxically, is apt to result in even more extreme behavior. Even a malignant narcissist, in the climb to power, operates within certain external political constraints. But once he has attained absolute power, he can act out the grandiose fantasies that he had hitherto kept in some check. Fantasies, however, are not good guides to action. The individual under their pull is apt to overestimate his capabilities, fail to appreciate realistic obstacles in the external environment, and act in increasingly chaotic ways. As his cruelties and apparent erratic behaviors expand, he creates new enemies. Eventually, as he engages in ever more extreme behavior, his major psychological defense – paranoia – breaks down.

The particular finale to the tyrant’s story, however, will depend on the political structure in which he operates and the vicissitudes of fortune. If his extreme behavior leads to the creation of opposing alliances, new boundaries may keep his potential for fragmentation in check. But if he has undertaken a path that permits no face-saving exit, he may take a route that risks the structures he has built. Caught in a maelstrom of conflicting wishes and emotions and undertaking adventures for which there is no realistic productive end, the individual in such circumstances may seek some sort of way out. For those confronting such a leader, efforts should be made to maintain clear, firm, but non-provocative boundaries. Compromise with him is likely only to whet the appetite. But confrontations that humiliate him could lead to behavior that is destructive both to him and those threatening him. Short of keeping such a person from ever coming to power, the creation of countervailing constraints that are both clear and impersonally used may be the best alternative available. (pp. 33–34)

At what point do leaders reveal that they may not be of sound mind? To paraphrase Glad (2002), when the leader under the spell of narcissistic dreams of glory begins “to overestimate his capabilities, fail to appreciate realistic obstacles in the external environment, and act in increasingly chaotic ways” (p. 33) – to which one might add, when he fails to heed the counsel of his closest and most trusted advisers.

Within the parameters of the theoretical framework employed by Glad (2002) in her analysis of “why tyrants go too far,” the malignant narcissist’s

antisocial behavior is manifest in aggression or sadism directed against others or against himself through suicidal and self-destructive behavior. He also has strong tendencies toward paranoia (Kernberg, 1992, p. 81; Post, 1993, pp. 102–104), that is, “delusions of conspiracy and victimization” that are apt to be well concealed from those around him (Robins & Post, 1997, p. 4). The central defense of such a person, Volkan (1988, pp. 99–100, 201) argued, is splitting. Such a person maintains some sort of stability via a paranoid defense. He dichotomizes the world into good and evil elements, projecting his own dark side and vulnerabilities onto an external source, transforming an internal conflict into an external one. Thus, he is able to distance himself from an internal conflict by transforming that conflict into an external battle between himself as the representative of good and the scapegoat as the representative of evil. (p. 22)

Do attitudes predict behavior?

References

Fisher, M. (2022, March 16). As Russia digs in, what’s the risk of nuclear War? ‘It’s not zero.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/ukraine-russia-nuclear-war.html

Glad, B. (2002). Why tyrants go too far: Malignant narcissism and absolute power. Political Psychology, 23(1), 1–37.

Griebie, A., & Immelman, A. (2021, July). The personality profile and leadership style of U.S. president Joe Biden. Paper presented at the 44^th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, July 11–13, 2021 (virtual conference). https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/132

Immelman, A. (1998a). The political personalities of 1996 U.S. presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. The Leadership Quarterly, 9(3), 335–366. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(98)90035-2

Immelman, A. (1998b, July). The political personality of U.S. vice president Al Gore. Paper presented at the 21^st Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Montréal, PQ, Canada, July 12–15, 1998. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/37/

Immelman, A. (2002). The political personality of U.S. president George W. Bush. In L. O. Valenty & O. Feldman (Eds.), Political leadership for the new century: Personality and behavior among American leaders (pp. 81–103). Praeger.

Immelman, A. (2007, July). The political personalities of 2008 Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Paper presented at the 30^th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Portland, OR, July 4–7, 2007. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/28/

Immelman, A. (2010, July). The political personality of U.S. president Barack Obama. Paper presented at the 33^rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, San Francisco, CA, July 7–10, 2010. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/25/

Immelman, A. (2012, July). The political personality of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Paper presented at the 35^th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Chicago, IL, July 6–9, 2012. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/98/

Immelman, A. (2016a, October). The political personality of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Collegeville and St. Joseph, MN: St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/102/

Immelman, A. (2016b, October). The political personality of 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump. Paper presented at the 41^st Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, San Antonio, TX, July 4–7, 2018. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/103/

Immelman, A., & Beatty, A. (2005, July). The political personality of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Paper presented at the 28^th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Toronto, ON, July 3–6, 2005. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/29/

Immelman, A., & Griebie, A. (2020, July). The personality profile and leadership style of U.S. president Donald J. Trump in office. Paper presented at the 43^rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Berlin, Germany, July 14–16, 2020 (virtual conference). http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/129/

Millon, T. (2011). Disorders of personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD spectrum from normal to abnormal (3^rd ed.). Wiley.

Young, B. R. (2022, March 6). Putin has a grimly absolute vision of the ‘Russian World.’ Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/06/russia-putin-civilization/

For most of its supporters, the Servant of the People Party was political entertainment: a convention with Coca-Cola, pizza, and shawarma (a gyro sandwich), a selfie with a popular actor, memes such as “Let It Be the Stadium Then” and “Let’s Beat Them All Together,” Volodymyr Zelensky‘s phenomenal victory, a cinematic inauguration. A young, handsome and quick-witted leader. However, the phenomenon of the Servant of the People Party was precisely the fact that it was perceived as a project of the protagonist of the film version, Vasyl Holoborodko, rather than that of the real president, Zelensky.

‘I Will Never Let You All Down’

On April 21, 2019, at 8 p.m, Zelensky and members of his team appeared before journalists to the sounds of the song “I Love My Country” from the soundtrack to the film (and TV series) Servant of the People. At that moment, it seemed that this simple song was being sung not only by the victorious candidate himself, but also by the 73 percent of the electorate who had voted for him.

Zelensky was still in the character of Vasyl—the high-school teacher, who, in the TV series, became head of state—and tried to joke, to toss barbs at the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine), which, according to him, kept him on his toes at all times, and to show optimism.

In 2019, Ukraine’s sixth president announced: “I promise I will never let you all down.” Since then, we have seen Zelensky in various situations. He and his team have been criticized for being unprofessional. They have been accused of corruption, arrogance and even treason.

However, starting from February 24, 2022, the beginning of Russia’s large-scale aggression against the Ukrainian state, we have discovered a completely different Zelensky. A man who was not afraid to accept Vladimir Putin‘s challenge and become the leader of popular resistance to Russian aggression. A president who managed to unite in this fight his supporters and opponents, corrupt officials and fighters against corruption, adults and children, people of different nationalities and faiths. A head of state who is greeted with applause in European parliaments and the U.S. Congress.

It has to be said that Ukrainians are accustomed to believing in myths: in the gold of Hetman Polubotko, which is allegedly kept somewhere in Britain (supposedly deposited in the Bank of England in the 1700s by a Ukrainian national, to be repaid with a high interest rate upon Ukraine’s independence), in the messianism of former president Viktor Yushchenko, in the fact that all their problems would be solved by Zelensky and his party. Just like in the movies.

A Ukrainian tank heads towards Lysychansk, Ukraine, Friday June 10, 2022.
Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Getty

But people have completely forgotten that the Servant of the People Party is not a TV series about Holoborodko and his bicycle. It represents themselves and the future of their children. They trusted Zelensky and his team. Whether or not this decision was correct will become clear in the aftermath of the Russian-Ukrainian war, because it has been up to Zelensky and the Servant of the People not only to fulfill their election promises, but literally to fight for Ukrainian independence.

To Look Into the Eyes of Putin

During the first few months of his presidency, Zelensky sought a meeting with Putin. The new leader of Ukraine was anxious to fulfill his campaign promise—to end the war in the Donbas. He understood that his campaign rhetoric, which had been reduced to the formula “just stop shooting,” had proved unviable. It was necessary to sit down at the negotiating table with Putin.

Zelensky said he wanted to look the master of the Kremlin in the eye and understand him as a person. For this reason, he was ready for anything—for another truce in the Donbas, even if it did not bring peace; for the dispersal of forces on the front line; for another settlement with Moscow. Zelensky sincerely believed that, if he looked into the eyes of the Russian president, he would at least see some sign of sadness about the 14,000 dead in the Donbas.

The Ukrainian president seemed convinced that his actor’s charisma and unique charm would work wonders in Paris, where the Normandy Four summit was scheduled for December 9, 2019, and he would return home with guarantees of an end to the war in eastern Ukraine. At the same time, Zelensky completely forgot that Putin was no worse an actor than he was. Seriously, Putin had played the role of peacemaking president for 20 years, pretending that “they’re not there.” In Georgia, the Transnistria region and Syria. The same in Ukraine.

The guard of honor lined up in the courtyard of the Élysée Palace. French President Emmanuel Macron greeted guests on the porch, with journalists standing in front of the guard of honor. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the first to arrive. A Mercedes-Benz drove Ms. Merkel almost up to the doorstep of the palace, where, dressed in a blue jacket, she was met and kissed by an elegant and smiling Macron. A Renault Espace, with Zelensky, was the second car to drive into the courtyard and stop at the gate. The president of Ukraine walked briskly toward the president of France and cheerfully greeted Macron. Against this background, one of the Russian journalists shouted: “Mr. Zelensky, what would be a success for you? Mr. Zelensky! Mr. Zelensky, please answer the question! Mr. Zelensky!” However, Macron and Zelensky ignored the man shouting from the crowd and, like two good friends, marched to the entrance of the palace.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend their summit on Ukraine at Elysee Palace on December 9, 2019 in Paris, France.
Christophe Petit Tesson/Getty

Putin was the last to arrive. He tried not to show any emotion. The master of the Kremlin emerged slowly from the Aurus-41231SB Senat L700 car and just as ponderously plodded around the courtyard, approached Macron, shook his hand, and disappeared inside. This episode was very expressive. The state leader, who was trying to instill fear in Europe and the world, looked old, lame, and was no match for Macron and Zelensky. It was a different era, a different age, a different mentality, a different thirst for life.

There were nine hours of talks ahead as well as Zelensky’s debut press conference as a member of the Normandy Four. The very fact that the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia were meeting after a three-year break was already a victory. Behind closed doors, Zelensky met one-on-one with Putin, then with Macron, and later with Merkel. He did not say publicly what he had seen in his Russian counterpart’s eyes. Apparently, Putin used his traditional negotiation techniques—blackmail, intimidation and the carrot-and-stick method. During the protocol photoshoot before the talks, Zelensky was noticeably nervous. At first, he wanted to take Putin’s place, then he turned to talk to journalists and inadvertently showed them some papers. These were topics for negotiations.

“Once everyone has left,” the Russian president told Zelensky, pointing to the person in charge of the photoshoot, “we will start negotiations.” The Ukrainian president took a sip of water. His anxiety was obvious.

Then there were negotiations. Zelensky did not seem impressed by his tête-à-tête with Putin. By the end of the summit, the presidents of Russia and Ukraine had not arrived at a common position on the future of the Donbas.

Putin was relentless—this was only to be as prescribed in the Minsk agreements, i.e., on the day after the elections in the ORDLO (the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine). Zelensky was against this and complained about the Minsk agreements, which had been approved by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. However, in the press release all parties expressed their intention to agree on the legal aspects of the special status of local self-government in the ORDLO and to elaborate on the Steinmeier formula (which called for local elections under the auspices of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in the separatist-controlled region in the east, followed by a special self-governing status). Only a few people know for sure what was really going on behind the scenes at the Paris summit. Interior minister Arsen Avakov praised the Ukrainian president and told reporters that the latter had allegedly asked (Russian diplomat) Sergei Lavrov not to nod his head. “Volodymyr Zelensky, in conversation, mostly in Russian, finally exploded and said: ‘Mr. Lavrov, stop nodding, there is no need to nod! Yes, I know your last name, because, unlike you, I walked around all these places along the border on my own legs.”

The next meeting of the Normandy Four, scheduled for March 2020, did not take place, as by then the world was engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic. All Zelensky’s attempts to negotiate with Putin over the course of two years had failed.

In spring 2021, when the Ukrainian president suggested that the master of the Kremlin meet him in the Donbas. Putin replied: “We are interested in the Russian language, the church, the citizens of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. The Donbas is an internal issue of the Ukrainian state.” Five months later, Russian deputy security secretary Dmitry Medvedev wrote in the Russian Kommersant business newspaper that any contact with Ukraine’s current leadership was meaningless and Moscow would wait for a change of government in Kyiv. And four months after that, on February 24, 2022, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Despite all this, Zelensky is still ready to meet with the Russian president. However, this would no longer be in order to look him in the eye, but to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The President of War

Zelensky sought to become the president of peace in 2019. He promised to end the war in the Donbas and to put an end to the thorny relations with the Russian Federation. For this, as he said, he was ready even to negotiate with the devil. However, the devil in the Kremlin was prepared to negotiate with Zelensky on just one thing—the capitulation of Ukraine to Russia. That is something to which Zelensky could not agree.

Thus, Putin left Zelensky no choice. He was forced to become the president of war rather than the president of peace. He had a complicated mission—to lead his country into battle against the Russian occupiers. This is a difficult ordeal for someone who has never served in the army and who had no experience in politics until 2019.

Prior to the war, almost every one of Zelensky’s public addresses was reminiscent of his acting past. Pauses, facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures. There was too much theatricality and artificiality in all this.

MARCH 11, 2022 – President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pictured during his regular address to the nation, Kyiv, capital of Ukraine. The head of state said that we had already reached a strategic turning point and were moving towards our victory.
Ukrinform/Future Publishing/Getty

Beginning on February 24, 2022, the first day of Russia’s war against Ukraine, all this would disappear from Zelensky’s arsenal. We would see a completely different person. With a weary and unshaven face. In khaki green clothing, without a tie, no makeup, or TV spotlights. A president who speaks painfully about Ukrainians in all walks of life who had fallen into the vortex of the Russian–Ukrainian war. A person with real emotions. A leader of the Ukrainian nation who will call out to the world about the war in his land.

The sixth president of Ukraine has come a long way— from an actor to the leader of the Ukrainian nation. From a man who was met with interest and irony by leaders of the world’s nations, to a politician who is now met with applause in the West, and by world leaders who consider it an honor to call him their friend.

Excerpt adapted from Zelensky: A Biography by Serhii Rudenko. Copyright © 2022 Polity Press.

Correction 6/30/2022 8:05am EST: The author’s name was misspelled and has been corrected. Newsweek sincerely regrets the mistake.

Russian President Vladimir Putin still wants to seize most of Ukraine, but his forces are so degraded by combat that they likely can only achieve incremental gains in the near term, the top US intelligence officer said Wednesday (29 June).

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, outlining the current US intelligence assessment of the more than four-month war, said that the consensus of US spy agencies is that it will grind on “for an extended period of time.”

“In short, the picture remains pretty grim and Russia’s attitude toward the West is hardening,” Haines told a Commerce Department conference.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week told US President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders that he wants the war over by the end of the year.

But Haines’ comments suggested that the billions of dollars in modern arms being supplied by the United States and other countries to Zelenskyy’s forces may not give them the ability to turn the tide against Russia any time soon.

She said that Putin remains intent on overruning most of Ukraine even though Ukrainian forces beat back Russia’s attempt to capture the capital Kyiv in February, forcing Moscow to reduce its target to seizing the entire eastern Donbas region.

“We think he has effectively the same political goals that we had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine,” Haines said.

Russian forces, however, have been so degraded by more than four months of combat that it is unlikely they can achieve Putin’s goal any time soon, Haines said in her first public assessment of the war since May.

“We perceive a disconnect between Putin’s near-term military objectives in this area and his military’s capacity, a kind of mismatch between his ambitions and what the military is able to accomplish,” she said.

Haines said US intelligence agencies see three possible scenarios, the most likely being a grinding conflict in which Russian forces “make incremental gains, with no breathrough.”

The other scenarios include a major Russian breakthrough and Ukraine succeeding in stabilizing the frontlines while achieving small gains, perhaps near the Russian-held city of Kherson and other areas of southern Ukraine.

It will take years for Russia to rebuild its forces, she said.

“During this period, we anticipate that they’re going to be more reliant on assymetric tools that they have, such as cyber attacks, efforts to control energy, even nuclear weapons in order to try to manage and project power and influence globally,” Haines said.

“In the interim, Russian troops are unlikely to be able to conduct multiple simultaneous operations,” Haines continued.

Putin’s priority now, she said, is making gains in the Donbas region and collapsing Ukrainian forces, a development that Russia assesses will “cause the resistance from within to slump.”

Haines’ comments came after a summit of NATO leaders on Wednesday branded Russia the most “direct threat” to alliance security and vowed to modernize Kyiv’s forces, saying it stood behind their “heroic defense of their country.”

Russia launched what it calls a “special military operation” against Ukraine on 24 February to eliminate what it deemed a fascist government that threatened its security.

Ukraine, the United States and other countries say Russia is conducting an unjustified war of aggression against its neighbor.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy is perhaps the closest thing to a mythical hero modern politics has to offer. Ukraine’s courageous wartime president captured the world’s imagination with his haunting, straight-to-camera monologues delivered under bombardment. A comic actor turned leader of the resistance, his story is a political fairytale. But is it almost too good to be true?

Truth and fiction collide in the Ukrainian journalist Serhii Rudenko’s quirky and fascinating biography, describing how a man best known for playing a teacher who unexpectedly becomes head of state subsequently did something similar himself.

When Zelenskiy interrupted his own show on New Year’s Eve 2018 to announce his real-life presidential candidacy direct to viewers, many wondered if it was a joke. Even by the end of the campaign, Rudenko writes, there was still “no such thing as Zelensky the politician”; just a comedian fronting an essentially virtual movement, with no formal members and little ideology beyond appealing to Ukrainians’ exasperation with corruption. “I am not your opponent, I am your verdict,” he memorably told the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, during a TV debate.

As Rudenko points out, however, the idea of disrupting politics by starting a party from scratch potentially served a more serious purpose for Ihor Kolomoisky, the powerful oligarch owner of the TV station behind Zelenskiy’s show. Kolomoisky’s lawyer became one of the candidate’s closest advisers, prompting suspicions about who was really pulling the strings. Yet, in time, the new president would distance himself from his original patrons, finally emerging from their shadow – at least in Rudenko’s telling – as the man we see today.

This hero isn’t perfect, of course. His inexperience is painfully obvious in early dealings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin or on economic policy. Having promised to stop cronyism, he gives jobs to friends and media colleagues; scandals engulf some of his new MPs, and the cars of his political enemies develop an odd habit of catching fire. Disillusionment sets in. But then Putin invades, instantly uniting Ukrainians behind their charismatic leader in an existential battle that, Rudenko patriotically concludes, could signify the “final rupture” between Russia and Ukraine.

The book was originally intended for a Ukrainian audience, who I suspect may be able to read things between the lines that foreigners can’t, particularly in chapters involving some of the more scurrilous rumours about Zelenskiy. But whatever nuances are lost in translation, Rudenko’s central argument couldn’t be clearer: it’s that Putin fatally underestimated his opponent, and will now pay the price. But is that really how the story ends?

The former BBC Moscow correspondent Philip Short’s magisterial Putin: His Life and Times takes a more sober view. Eight years in its gestation and based on access to a Who’s Who of senior politicians, diplomats and intelligence sources, it’s an illuminating attempt to understand the Russian leader from a Russian rather than western perspective. The KGB man-turned-president is, the author suggests, “no more an aberration in Russia than Donald Trump in America, Boris Johnson in Britain or Emmanuel Macron in France”. Like it or not, he is one of the defining figures of our age, and all too often we’re reading him wrong.

A series of eccentric public appearances on the eve of war prompted some to question a clearly frail Putin’s sanity. But Short interprets these as a version of Richard Nixon’s “madman” gambit, “intended to make him appear so irrational and unpredictable that adversaries would hesitate before testing his resolve”. (If so, the west’s cautious approach to military involvement in Ukraine suggests it worked.) Where some see a cold-eyed killer routinely murdering opponents, Short distinguishes between attacks he thinks the president could conceivably have authorised personally – such as the poisoning of the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, or the attempted murder of his rival Alexei Navalny – and those more likely attributable to freelancing among allies, while noting that allowing powerful figures to feel “that they could literally get away with murder” isn’t morally much different from ordering it.

One question haunting this book is whether there was in hindsight a way of avoiding the current war

Short’s Putin is a man of violent emotions ruthlessly repressed; habitually late (a powerplay over those kept waiting), devoid of small talk, so inscrutable that when he proposed to his wife she initially thought he was dumping her. This knack of being what the German security expert Franz J Sedelmayer calls “perfectly grey” in his intentions helped Putin transition seamlessly first from an unremarkable intelligence career into politics (initially working for the powerful mayor of St Petersburg) and then up through the Kremlin’s ranks without being perceived as a threat.

He is pragmatic – not necessarily a compliment in 1990s St Petersburg, where Short writes that “the distinction between politicians, businessmen and criminals was almost completely effaced” and running the city involved opening channels to organised crime – rather than ideological. But his guiding beliefs are nostalgia for past glory, a hankering for a national identity to fill the gap left by communism, and an abhorrence of showing weakness. The lesson of a childhood trading blows with local neighbourhood toughs, he has said, is that if “you want to win a fight you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life”. The defining event of his life, however, is the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, about which he once raged that “Russia had lost too much, it had been too humiliated”. Ukraine’s misfortune is to embody this humiliation for him.

Short traces the roots of conflict from promises made to Russia in the 1990s that Nato wouldn’t expand eastwards, through the Bush administration’s flirtation with the idea of Ukraine joining, to Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea – which Putin insisted was to keep Ukraine out of Nato. (The author gives rather less space to the counter-argument that, however wounding it is to Russian pride, former Soviet republics are free now to make their own choices, including over how to defend themselves from their volatile neighbour.)

Putin’s goal in the current war, Short thinks, is both to make Ukraine declare neutrality and “to show that the United States was powerless to prevent it”. Victory for him may be defined less by territory gained, and more by whether America’s reluctance to intervene directly causes Nato members such as Poland or the Baltics to wonder whether their allies would risk nuclear war to save them either, thus undermining the alliance.

One question haunting this book is whether there was a way of avoiding all this, given Putin’s initial willingness to work with the west in return for economic benefits he thought would help him domestically, plus Europe’s desire for peace. Towards the end, Short lists the decisions he thinks put Washington and Moscow on a collision path, arguing essentially that both sides did what seemed logical to them at the time, but failed at critical moments to grasp how that looked from the other side. There could be no more powerful case for reading both these books than that conflict is so often rooted in human failures of understanding.

• Zelensky: A Biography by Serhii Rudenko is published by Polity (£20) and Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

For New York musician Erica Mancini, COVID-19 made repeat performances.

March 2020. Last December. And again this May.

“I’m bummed to know that I might forever just get infected,” said the 31-year-old singer, who is vaccinated and boosted. “I don’t want to be getting sick every month or every two months.”

But medical experts warn that repeat infections are getting more likely as the pandemic drags on and the virus evolves – and some people are bound to get hit more than twice. Emerging research suggests that could put them at higher risk for health problems.

There’s no comprehensive data on people getting COVID-19 more than twice, although some states collect information on reinfections in general. New York, for example, reports around 277,000 reinfections out of 5.8 million total infections during the pandemic. Experts say actual numbers are much higher because so many home COVID-19 tests go unreported.

Several public figures have recently been reinfected. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said they got COVID-19 for the second time, and U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said he tested positive a third time. All reported being fully vaccinated, and Trudeau and Becerra said they’d gotten booster shots.

“Until recently, it was almost unheard of, but now it’s becoming more commonplace” to have COVID-19 two, three or even four times, said Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute. “If we don’t come up with better defenses, we’ll see much more of this.”

Why? Immunity from past infections and vaccination wanes over time, experts say, leaving people vulnerable.

Also, the virus has evolved to be more contagious. The risk of reinfection has been about seven times higher with omicron variants compared with when delta was most common, research out of the United Kingdom shows. Scientists believe the omicron mutants now causing the vast majority of U.S. cases are particularly adept at getting around immunity from vaccination or past infection, especially infection during the original omicron wave. U.S. health officials are mulling whether to modify boosters to better match recent changes in the coronavirus.

The first time Mancini got COVID-19, she and her fiancé spiked fevers and were sick for two weeks. She couldn’t get tested at the time but had an antibody test a couple months later that showed she had been infected.

“It was really scary because it was so new and we just knew that people were dying from it,” said Mancini. “We were really sick. I hadn’t been sick like that in a long time.”

She got vaccinated with Pfizer in the spring of 2021 and thought she was protected from another infection, especially since she was sick before. But though such “hybrid immunity” can provide strong protection, it doesn’t guarantee someone won’t get COVID-19 again.

Mancini’s second bout, which happened during the huge omicron wave, started with a sore throat. She tested negative at first, but still felt sick driving to a gig four hours away. So she ducked into a Walgreens and did a rapid test in her car. It was positive, she said, “so I just turned the car around and drove back to Manhattan.”

This bout proved milder, with “the worst sore throat of my life,” a stuffy nose, sneezing and coughing.

The most recent illness was milder still, causing sinus pressure, brain fog, a woozy feeling and fatigue. That one, positive on a home test and confirmed with a PCR test, hit despite her Moderna booster shot.

Mancini doesn’t have any known health conditions that could put her at risk for COVID-19. She takes precautions like masking in the grocery store and on the subway. But she usually doesn’t wear a mask on stage.

“I’m a singer, and I’m in these crowded bars and I’m in these little clubs, some of which don’t have a lot of ventilation, and I’m just around a lot of people,” said Mancini, who also plays accordion and percussion. “That’s the price that I’ve paid for doing a lot throughout these past few years. It’s how I make my living.”

Scientists don’t know exactly why some people get reinfected and others don’t, but believe several things may be at play: health and biology, exposure to particular variants, how much virus is spreading in a community, vaccination status and behavior. British researchers found people were more likely to be reinfected if they were unvaccinated, younger or had a mild infection the first time.

Scientists also aren’t sure how soon someone can get infected after a previous bout. And there’s no guarantee each infection will be milder than the last.

“I’ve seen it go both ways,” said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist. In general, though, breakthrough infections that happen after vaccination tend to be milder, he said.

Doctors said getting vaccinated and boosted is the best protection against severe COVID-19 and death, and there’s some evidence it also lessens the odds of reinfection.

At this point, there haven’t been enough documented cases of multiple reinfections “to really know what the long-term consequences are,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor University’s tropical medicine school.

But a large, new study using data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which hasn’t yet been reviewed by scientific peers, provides some insight, finding that reinfection increases the risk for serious outcomes and health problems such as lung issues, heart disorders and diabetes compared with a first infection. The risks were most pronounced when someone was ill with COVID-19, but persisted past the acute illness as well.

After Mancini’s last bout, she dealt with dizziness, headaches, insomnia and sinus issues, though she wondered if that was more due to her busy schedule. In a recent week, she had 16 shows and rehearsals — and has no room for another COVID-19 reprise.

“It was not fun,” she said. “I don’t want to have it again.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Ukrainian forces continue to hold their positions in the city of Lyschansk following their withdrawal from Sieverodonetsk. Russian forces continue to pursue an approach of creeping envelopment from the Popasna direction, removing the need to force a major new crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River in this sector.

Current ground combat is likely focused around the Lyschansk oil refinery, 10km south-west of the city centre. At the operational level, Russian force continue to make limited progress as they attempt to encircle Ukrainian defenders in northern Donetsk Oblast via advances from Izium.

It is highly likely that Ukrainian forces’ ability to continue fighting delaying battles, and then withdraw troops in good order before they are encircled, will continue to be a key factor in the outcome of the campaign.