Drastic instead of diplomatic
British minister calls Putin ‘crazy’
2/23/2022, 9:28 p.m
The British defense secretary is a soldier and probably no friend of cryptic assessments. Wallace calls the Russian president “completely insane”. Only the Kremlin critic Navalny put it more harshly: For him, Putin is a “senile grandfather”.
British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has caused a sensation with unvarnished statements about Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We now have a busy opponent in Putin who is completely out of his mind,” Wallace is said to have said to representatives of the armed forces in a government building in London, according to the British news agency Press Association.
Accordingly, Wallace also compared Putin to the Russian Tsar Nicholas I: “Tsar Nicholas I made the same mistake as Putin: he had no friends, no alliances.” Wallace, himself a former army officer in the Scottish Guards regiment, added: “The Scots Guards kicked Tsar Nicholas I’s butt in Crimea in 1853 – we can always do it again.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday that Putin was in an “illogical and irrational state of mind”. On Monday, the Russian President recognized Ukraine’s self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and announced that Russian troops would be sent to the eastern regions. The West sees this as a clear breach of international law and an attack on the European peace order.
Navalny comments on Putin’s speech on Twitter
Immediately after the broadcast of Putin’s speech, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called him “insane.” “Of course, the man is totally insane,” said Rutte on a TV talk show on Monday evening.
The opposition activist Alexei Navalny, who was imprisoned in a Russian prison camp, commented on Putin’s TV speech on Twitter in a similar way, but more analytically. Unlike the CPSU Politburo, Putin’s people have no ideology, “just persistent and open lies. They don’t even bother to give their reason for war any semblance of credibility.” Putin called Navalny a “senile grandfather”.
According to Navalny, Putin’s war threats are intended to distract attention from domestic problems such as inflation. Although in English, he writes to his Russian readers: “The Kremlin is making you poorer, not Washington.” Navalny is imprisoned in a penal camp about 100 kilometers east of Moscow. He is currently facing up to 15 years in prison in a new trial.