Putin’s Delusions

By Howard Bloom

At 9 am Moscow time Wednesday September 21, Vladimir Putin gave his first address to the Russian nation since he started his Ukraine war in February 2022. The speech was shocking. It revealed a worldview radically different from yours and mine.

Shock number one was Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons, a threat amplified a few hours later by a former Russian member of parliament and Putin advisor, Sergei Markov, who went on BBC Radio 4 threatening nuclear war and told British listeners that Russia is targeting England’s cities with nuclear warheads.

Shocker number two in Putin’s speech was his reminder that Russia’s nuclear weapons are more advanced than ours. He has hypersonic cruise missiles that, he claimed a few months ago, can evade all of our defenses. We do not have hypersonic missiles that equal his.

Shocker number three was that Russia is going into what Putin termed a partial mobilization. Calling up another 300,000 troops. Which could nearly triple the size of the Russian force in Ukraine. But at least one Russia expert claims that the figure of 300,000 is too low. In reality, he says, Putin has tapped into a pool of up to a million potential…