ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

By televising his Russian Security Council meeting on Monday, we got an insight into the way Vladimir Putin welds power over Russia. Putin sat distanced from other members of the Council, enthroned behind a desk. He came across as high camp Bond villain with each Council member challenged to give an opinion. It was clear there was only one right view, and that was Putin's, no matter what it was.

The most absurd moment came from Sergei Naryshkin, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who fluffed his lines and became the designated scapegoat. I was surprised Putin didn't casually flick a switch to drop poor Naryshin into a pool of hungry piranhas.

This type of power is so foreign to spectators in the West it appears almost cinematic in its ridiculousness. Putin becomes more than a man, he is a Tsar, a sort of demi-god. We see a mad, King Lear figure, from whom all power flows. We cannot compute this, as we have no such centre of Western power. Political leaders, liberal elites, military big wigs, Big Tech, the media, banking institutions, industrialists and woke academics are all said to be where 'real power' resides. 

Forty-eight hours before he launched his attack, on 21 February Vladimir Putin summoned the most senior members of his regime to an extraordinary, televised meeting in the Kremlin. Sitting behind an enormous white desk in the great gilded Hall of the Order of St Catherine, he called them up, one at a time, to a lectern and asked them whether they supported the decision to recognise the independence of the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine.

Some were enthusiastic. Nikolai Patrushev, the security council's secretary and one of Putin's closest allies, claimed that Nato and the United States were using Ukraine to try to "destroy the Russian Federation". Others, such as the prime minister Mikhail Mishustin, who is meant to be overseeing Russia's economic development, looked decidedly uncomfortable but said they agreed.

Then it was the turn of Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service and ostensibly one of the country's most powerful men. But standing in front of Putin, he stuttered and stammered, struggling to formulate the correct response. The Russian president drummed his fingers on the desk and smirked. "I will support the decision to recognise," Naryshkin ventured. "I will support, or I support?" Putin cut in. "Speak directly!" The exchange went on like this for several minutes before he was finally satisfied and allowed his spy chief to sit back down.

It was a theatrical display of raw political power that was clearly designed to show that Putin wields absolute, personal control. The footage was pre-recorded, so Naryshkin's humiliation could have been edited out. Instead, the full, excruciating encounter was broadcast at prime time on Russian state television. The wider meeting functioned as a loyalty test, requiring every senior official and any potential future rivals to state on camera that they supported Putin's decision.

"Probably deep down he knows he's risking something," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of authoritarian political systems and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. "The way I read this is that he is taking a big gamble, so he wanted to stage this performance to force these people to show that they agree with him and reaffirm that they are his lackeys."

Sitting alone at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned behind a vast desk in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin's idea of social distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little more than forty-eight hours, Putin's sensible, peace-talking statesman act flipped into something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters.

As Putin's hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: "Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out]."

Indeed. Putin's rambling and uncharacteristically emotional address to the nation and the bizarrely staged Security Council meeting that preceded it carried the distinct whiff of the dying days of the USSR. The ministers standing by to publicly agree (some more convincingly than others) with the boss; the formulaic tropes about protecting Russian-speaking people from "genocide"; the clichés about the "illegitimate" government in Kyiv. The spectacle resembled nothing so much as Leonid Brezhnev's slurred 1979 announcement that the Soviet Union had to fulfill its "internationalist duty" to protect the people of Afghanistan.

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