Putin paranoid and fears assassination attempt: ‘Afraid of everyone’
Fear of assassination attacks is growing among Putin and those around him, and security has been stepped up considerably. In an interview on French news channel LCI, French historian and author Stéphane Courtois gives his analysis.
The historian outlines the context. ‘There have been many assassinations around Vladimir Putin, we've had Prigogine, we've had Nemsov, we've had Navalny,...So he obviously also fears for his own security, fuelled by the KGB, a totally paranoid organisation that saw enemies everywhere. He especially has in mind the image of the death of the Libyan dictator Gaddafi, that man who was trapped and crawled into a kind of manhole. All these dictators are afraid of ending up like him.’
Stéphane Courtois continues his analysis. ‘Assassinations and poisonings are nothing new. Lenin had the poison laboratory set up in 1921-1922. And by a man who would become the head of the NKVD, the political police that would later become the KGB.’
For the historian, the most important thing is to understand the real motivation behind Putin's actions and thinking. ‘It is a total dislike of the West, parliamentary democracy and freedom of the press,’ he says.
(FVDV and FM for Tagtik/Source: LCI/Photo: Wikicommons under license Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)
