PUTIN AND THE ART OF LEADERSHIP: TOWARD NOWHERE!

The great “philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin, this Rasputin with seasonal Wi-Fi and ideological ventriloquist of the Kremlin, has once again delivered humanity a historic revelation: Russians should receive internet access “in portions,” as a reward for proper behaviour. Exactly like dog biscuits or sugar cubes for ponies. If you are a disciplined citizen, perhaps you earn twenty minutes online and the supreme privilege of watching a video about tractors and a shirtless photograph of Putin fishing. In Dugin’s universe, the internet should be completely shut down in spring so that the people can return to the streets and rediscover “authentic life”: whistling beneath windows, exchanging potatoes, and taking patriotic scooter rides. A true rural-digital utopia where citizens reconnect with their humanity while standing in bread lines and discussing how comforting total state control really is. Naturally, the great thinker also explains that the internet must follow “the seasonal cycles of bears and butterflies.” Nothing could sound more modern. Silicon Valley has clearly lost its way: instead of investing in AI and fiber optics, it should have consulted a Siberian beekeeper and a forest ranger. At this rate, the Kremlin’s next great innovation will probably be “pedal-powered internet”: if you want to send an email, you must spin a bicycle wheel for two hours while singing the anthem of the Russian Federation. And if you post anything critical, the bear responsible for the seasonal cycle cuts your connection and confiscates your scooter. But Dugin’s real obsession is not technology. It is control. Freedom is “utopian,” says this prophet of authoritarianism wrapped in the scent of Soviet mothballs. Citizens must be permanently monitored — but by “our own people.” Because apparently it is infinitely more comforting to be patriotically suffocated by your own state than by someone else’s. A Stockholm syndrome elevated into a geopolitical doctrine. And somewhere behind this bunker philosophy stands the inevitable spiritual patron of the entire spectacle: Vladimir Putin. The eternal strategic genius of KGB basements. A bunker Napoleon with the vocabulary of an interrogation room and the charisma of a rusty metal cabinet. A man obsessively preaching about “Russia’s greatness” while reducing his own country’s influence, economy, and international respect with the efficiency of an arsonist proudly claiming to be a firefighter.

Putin is, without question, one of the most spectacular historical accidents of the twenty-first century: a grey Soviet political police bureaucrat who, through propaganda and fear, somehow came to believe he is simultaneously Peter the Great, Stalin, and Batman. Only the Russian version: no Gotham, no military genius, and no functioning industry — just bunkers, panicked oligarchs, and television networks lying with the enthusiasm of late-night infomercial hosts. Under his rule, Russia has become a theme park of imperial paranoia: half nuclear fortress, half nervous gas station haunted by expired Soviet nostalgia. The famous Red Army, displayed for years in perfectly choreographed parades, eventually collided with reality and transformed into a collection of abandoned tanks, missing logistics, and generals who appear to have studied military strategy from fortune cookies. An operation so chaotic that even military history itself seems to stare at the scene and ask: “Seriously? That’s all you had?” And the economy? A masterpiece of self-destruction. Even the oligarchs — those vampires of post-Soviet luxury — have probably begun frantically searching “how to survive without French champagne” and “how to pawn a palace without looking desperate.” Meanwhile, the population is being taught that patriotism means standing in line while applauding your own sanctions. Putin’s greatest strategic achievement, however, remains something else entirely: he revitalized NATO more effectively than any Western leader and convinced half the planet that maps of Europe should be kept away from the Kremlin exactly the way matches are kept away from a drunken pyromaniac. If there were an international prize for accelerated geopolitical self-destruction, he would receive it riding a tank without fuel and without tracks. His speeches are masterpieces of post-Soviet absurdity. You watch them with the same fascination reserved for a failed magician trying to pull a rabbit out of a burning hat. Every time, he promises the rebirth of the empire and inevitable victory, while the elites quietly flee to Dubai, infrastructure decays, and propaganda grows increasingly hysterical. Clear, simple, and impossible to hide beneath mountains of propaganda: the “great empire” that was supposed to terrify the planet now mostly inspires irony, memes, and exhausted glances. Putin’s Russia resembles a superpower less and less, and increasingly an aging actor insisting on playing the leading role in a film nobody wants to watch anymore. And then comes the Kremlin’s true strategic nightmare: France.

Not the France caricatured by Russian propaganda, but the real France — the historical power that has passed through revolutions, empires, and world wars without losing its backbone. Here, the difference between Charles de Gaulle and Putin becomes almost painful for the Kremlin. De Gaulle was a statesman. Putin is an administrator of fear. De Gaulle built. Putin consumes. De Gaulle looked at France and saw a civilization. Putin looks at Russia and sees a fortress besieged by phantoms produced by his own propaganda. De Gaulle understood that a nation’s greatness does not come from televised hysteria and constant threats, but from independence, dignity, and cold strategy. That is why he built France’s nuclear doctrine: not as patriotic spectacle, but as a mathematical guarantee of sovereignty. While the Kremlin turns every missile into a televised episode for frightened pensioners, France maintains its strength in silence, with the calm of a civilization that knows exactly who it is. And what a contrast between the two figures. De Gaulle - solemn, almost sculptural, carrying on his shoulders the weight of a nation’s history. Putin - the eternal KGB functionary running through history like an angry accountant trying to recover a lost century. One inspired respect without raising his voice. The other constantly raises his voice precisely because real respect cannot be manufactured through fear. Perhaps this is the greatest irony of the entire story: the Kremlin presents itself as the defender of “traditional civilization,” yet the true European civilization — the one that produced literature, philosophy, republics, culture, and resistance — continues to breathe through Paris, not through the grey bunkers of the Russian security apparatus. De Gaulle left behind a stronger France. Putin risks leaving behind a smaller, more isolated, and more exhausted Russia. And history has a splendidly dark sense of humor: empires built on fear and resentment seem invincible right up until the moment they suddenly are not. Putin, the most powerful of them all, the supreme illusionist of modern geopolitics, the man who achieved the rare feat of surpassing his own propaganda without any external assistance. A lone “miracle worker” capable of delivering, with almost poetic consistency, his neighbors’ dream: “Little Russia — revised edition, permanently updated.” A strategist of such dazzling brilliance that, when viewed up close, one can no longer distinguish the boundary between plan and execution error. He has managed the historical feat of turning a state that wanted to appear intimidating into a global manual of “what not to do.” A leader who expands his maps only in PowerPoint, while reality erases his marker from the ground, line by line. A commander who has “optimized” his own army with the delicacy of a drunk surgeon working on the wrong atlas. Under this golden age of historical improvisation, half the planet has become, unwillingly, a global department of emergency Kremlinology - people drinking their coffee like catastrophe analysts, decoding every statement as another episode in a badly written but impossible-to-ignore series. Entire nations no longer “analyze Russian policy”; they simply try to anticipate the next moment when reality will outpace satire. And here, irony becomes almost redundant, because reality performs its job better than any satire ever could. When a leadership manages to turn power into an exercise in self-erosion, and ambition into an inventory of unintended consequences, commentary becomes nothing more than the echo of an already established obviousness. This is the man, the legend, the geopolitical magician who achieves the rare feat of confusing stubbornness with strategy and isolation with influence — a leader who does not merely saw off the branch he is sitting on, but calls it a “structural reform” while falling, with the calm aplomb of someone mistaking collapse for direction. A sign that gravity, logic, and reality itself have all gone off course.