'We Need To Talk About Putin' w/ Mark Galeotti
Channel: Norsk utenrikspolitisk institutt NUPI
Date: 2020-01-22

What do we really know about one of the most powerful men in the world after two decades in power? 

Putin has been in power for twenty years, but how much have we really learned about him? Why has such a mythology built around him, and why do so many in the West seem so much to want to believe so much of it?

Veteran Russia-watcher Mark Galeotti, London-based author of the recent and much-praised book 'We Need To Talk About Putin' will be in conversation with NUPI's Julie Wilhelmsen about Putin the man, Putin the myth, how observers can try to tell the two apart, and why it matters for policy towards Russia.

In the first chapter of the book, Galeotti writes:

“We need to talk about Putin. We really do. Not just because he is, like it or not, one of the most important people on the planet, and nor because of the impact of the geopolitical struggle he is waging with the West, with bluster and bluff, memes and money. It is also because he has become a global symbol, which everyone defines in their own way. […] he is like a Rorschach inkblot test used by psychologists: the splash of pigment is deliberately ambiguous; what we read into it says more about what is going on in our heads than what is on the paper.”