PUTIN’S FORMER DIPLOMATIC COUNTERPART EXPOSES THE INSECURE MAN BEHIND THE KREMLIN’S STRONGMAN IMAGE 🇷🇺🇺🇦 Volodymyr Ogryzko, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, met Vladimir Putin several times. Asked what the Russian leader was like in person, his answer was devastatingly brief: “Nothing.” Ogryzko remembers a man who struggled to maintain direct eye contact, avoided spontaneous conversation and spent long stretches of meetings reading from prepared documents rather than engaging with the people sitting opposite him. His impression was that Putin lacked confidence in unscripted discussions, although he could not say whether this reflected insufficient knowledge or simply a fear of making mistakes. What he did recognise was the influence of Putin’s KGB background, which seemed to shape his behaviour long before the full-scale invasion. Ogryzko described him as a “man in a case,” someone emotionally sealed off from those around him, performing a role rather than interacting naturally. The contrast with Boris Yeltsin was particularly striking. Whatever his shortcomings, Yeltsin could joke, speak openly and express himself without appearing imprisoned by a prepared script. Putin, in Ogryzko’s recollection, was the opposite. But the former minister is far less interested in theories about Putin’s supposed body doubles. Whether someone appears with a different face or “glued-on mustaches,” he argues, matters considerably less than the political system operating behind the Kremlin’s walls. And he rejects the comforting notion that Russia is secretly governed by a collective leadership capable of restraining its president. The Security Council meeting immediately before the February 2022 invasion offered, in his view, an unusually revealing demonstration of how power actually works in Moscow. Ogryzko summarised Putin’s attitude toward the officials gathered around him: “I decide everything. You are simply the people who approve these decisions.” For a leader who projects an image of absolute strength, Ogryzko’s personal recollections paint a very different portrait: a guarded, heavily scripted former intelligence officer presiding over a system in which those around him are expected to endorse decisions rather than challenge them.