The enigma of Vladimir Putin: What do we really know about Russia's leader?

MOSCOW – What can a table possibly say about a person's loyalties, habits, truthfulness, state of mind and, if you are Vladimir Putin, determination to invade Ukraine?

Maybe not a lot. But at least four times in the past week Russia's longest-serving president hosted talks with foreign dignitaries and his own senior diplomatic and defense staff over the prospect of a full-scale war with neighboring Ukraine from one end of an outlandishly, imposingly long desk.

Putin may be, as the Kremlin says, trying to avoid catching COVID-19. It could be a show of power. Or a snub. It may signal the Russian's retreat into the recesses of his own mind.

Or Putin may simply be fond of large tables.

(When Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, with whom Putin shares a fondness for right-wing politics, visited Moscow recently, he was welcomed by Putin from one side of a short table. The authoritarian leaders of Belarus and Hungary also got short tables.)

Still, the use of furniture to intimidate, charm, impress or whatever else seems to fit what the West thinks it knows – or doesn't know – about Putin: inscrutable, macho, distrustful, unpredictable, a cultivator of half-truths and disinformation, fabulously wealthy. A devious backer of plutonium-armed assassins and despots from Damascus to Pyongyang. An anti-democratic tyrant who is neither a man of the people nor a believer in human rights. A former KBG officer who remains culturally and psychologically tethered to a Soviet Union that no longer exists.

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Putin is not an oversharer with aides and is said to studiously avoid phones and computers over surveillance fears. Despite reports that the CIA has on-and-off over the years placed moles inside the Kremlin, gauging the contours of his mind has proven exceptionally difficult, according to experts, diplomats, Russia-watchers and Putin's own at-times curious words and actions.

"We do not understand fundamentally, none of us do, what is inside President Putin's head, and so we cannot make any guess about where this is headed," U.S. ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told reporters Tuesday.

Still, absent meaningful access to Putin or his inner circle, the world has been left with a plethora of conjecture, confusing tea leaves and James Bond-like villain tropes that have come to define, rightly or wrongly, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, 69.

And even as he has massed about 150,000 troops on Russia's borders with Ukraine, prompting fears of an invasion, deciphering Putin's agenda beyond his own self-preservation remains an exercise that yields little overall clarity.

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On Monday, Putin recognized two Russian-backed breakaway provinces of Ukraine as independent republics, further inflaming tensions with the West. He ordered troops to "maintain peace" in the provinces and convoys of armored vehicles were seen rolling across the separatist controlled territories late Monday, though it wasn't immediately clear if they were Russian.

President Joe Biden said Tuesday Biden was setting up a "rationale" to take more Ukraine territory and placed sanctions on Russian financial institutions.

Before signing the decrees recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk on Monday, Putin delivered a lengthy speech aired on Russian state TV, in which he rejected the idea of Ukrainian nationhood.

He called it “madness” that Ukraine had independence and claimed incorrectly that the country was only the product of power-brokering during the beginning of the Soviet Union.

“We have every reason to say it’s Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin that created Ukraine,” Putin declared, arguing that “modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia.”

The sometimes-rambling speech raised fresh questions about Putin's motivations and intentions.

What does he want?

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"The dog does not bother you, does she? She's a friendly dog and I'm sure she will behave herself," Putin once famously – menacingly – asked Germany's former Chancellor Angela Merkel when they met in Moscow, knowing full well that the leader of one of Europe's most powerful countries had an intense fear of dogs.

A photograph of the encounter shows Merkel looking anxious as Putin's black Labrador settles near her feet. Putin looks in their direction and grins.

From Syria's civil war to silencing his critics, from U.S. election meddling to Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014, Putin's political organizing principle appears to be: Sow doubt, then sow doubt about that doubt. At the very least, keep it all as confusing as possible.

In 2013, Putin published an op-ed in The New York Times warning President Barack Obama and the American people directly against military intervention in Syria and getting involved in the internal conflicts of other countries more generally. He then spent the best part of the next decade mercilessly bombing Syrian rebels and civilians to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Russia's leader spent the entirety of Donald Trump's presidency insisting that there had been no meddling in the 2016 election. A few months before Trump's term ended, Putin did an about-face and announced that there had in fact been election meddling in the vote that elected Trump – by Ukrainian oligarchs who had given money to Trump's political opponents, namely Hilary Clinton. Putin made the claims not in a news conference or press interview but in a sit-down discussion with filmmaker-turned-conspiracy-theorist Oliver Stone.

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When soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms seized control of Crimea in 2014, top Russian officials including Putin repeatedly denied they were members of the Russian military. A year later, Putin started boasting they were. In recent days, Putin has baselessly claimed that "genocide" is taking place in Donetsk and Luhansk. He has appeared to back fabricated claims by rebels that they are evacuating civilians from Donetsk and Luhansk because of aggression from Ukraine's military. Independent monitoring groups say that couldn't be further from the truth. As evidence mounts that Russia-backed separatists are shelling Ukraine's military, Russian officials assert it's the other way around.

"Putin pulls this on the American establishment again and again: threaten to escalate – negotiate – pull back; threaten to escalate – negotiate – pull back. Watching this, I get the sense that it's not U.S. foreign policy, but that short story by O. Henry, about the sneaky crook (Putin) tricking the village simpleton who thinks he's so smart (the U.S. State Department)," jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said in a Time magazine interview earlier this year.

A Russian court last year sentenced Navalny, a vocal Putin critic who has exposed Putin's riches and rights abuses, to almost three years prison for missing a parole hearing for an earlier corruption charge. The reason Navalny missed parole was because he was in Germany recovering from a poisoning attempt that the U.S. State Department and its counterparts in the U.K. and European Union blame on Putin.

In 2018, the British government concluded that Russian military intelligence operatives used a military-grade nerve agent to poison a former Russian double agent named Sergei Skripal.

"Putin has a whole array of projects he is working on to try to destroy me. The first is death. ... The second is kidnapping," Chicago-born British businessman Bill Browder told USA TODAY that same year.

Browder is the originator of the Magnitsky Act, a law adopted in several dozen countries, including the U.S., that seeks to hold Russian officials accountable for fraud, tax evasion, rights abuses and other corrupt practices. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax accountant who was beaten to death in a Moscow prison while working for Browder's since-dissolved investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management.

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What has Putin said?

Many of Putin's opponents – journalists, politicians, former business associates – have died in similarly violent or suspicious circumstances, both at home and abroad. The Kremlin has used the courts to snuff out free speech.

When state media reports surfaced on Feb. 15 that Russia had announced it was beginning to withdraw some troops from near Ukraine's borders, disinformation researcher Olga Tokariuk, who is Ukrainian, wrote on Twitter: "In fact, I think (Putin's) de-escalation signals are part of Russia's deceptive tactics. Putin doesn't like to make moves in the open, when all eyes are on him. The most dangerous moment (for Ukraine) would come when the world breathes a sigh of relief and its attention shifts elsewhere."

Yet there are some things that we think we know about what Putin wants, because he has said so at great length.

Washington-based think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace researchers Eugene Rumor and Andrew S. Weiss have written that "most evidence suggests that Putin was being sincere when he said the USSR's breakup was 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.'" They noted in a recent essay that Putin "has returned to this theme in one form or another on various occasions throughout the years."

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The topic usually comes up during his annual end-of-year marathon news conferences, where for hours Putin fields dozens of questions from domestic and international press as well as members of the public on issues from the silly to the profane.

In July, Putin published a 5,000-word article called "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." There, with impressive if not always accurate historical specificity, he argued that Ukraine, which gained its independence in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was capable of having "true sovereignty" only in "partnership with Russia."

In their paper, Rumor and Weiss note that in his illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region, Putin "stamped his legacy as a 'gatherer of Russian lands' – the first ruler since Stalin to expand the country’s territory. He has done all that and more despite repeated claims by foreign and some Russian observers that Russia is a declining power or merely, in the words of the late Sen. John McCain, a 'gas station masquerading as a country'" – an allusion to Russia's vast energy wealth and poor governance.

Whether it is Putin's instinct to gather "Russian lands" and restore his country's Cold War-era eminence; repeated assertions from the Kremlin that Ukraine's bid to join NATO represents for Moscow a major security threat; or a more general existential anxiety about stamping out Kyiv's democratic tendencies that is behind Putin's power play on Ukraine's borders is anyone's guess. All three explanations are typically invoked.

Wealth – but from where?

Putin's personal life and the source of his apparent fortune, too, are shrouded in mystery. His official salary is about $150,000, yet he wears $60,000 watches.

An investigation by Navalny revealed that Putin may be the real owner of a $1.3 billion opulent palace in southern Russia that has its own underground hockey rink, casino and church.

German media reported that a superyacht believed to belong to Putin abruptly left Hamburg, where it was having some repairs done, as tensions with Ukraine intensified and U.S. and European officials started talking about unprecedentedly tough sanctions if the invasion went ahead.

There is an ex-wife, at least two daughters, maybe a mistress or two. Putin has never been publicly photographed with his children.

Putin has promoted an image of himself as a defender of "traditional" family values and often invokes the Russian Orthodox Church in speeches.

In late January, Russian state media broadcast footage of him observing an Orthodox Christian ritual to mark the feast of Epiphany. Dressed in blue swimming trunks, Putin in the footage immerses himself in the icy waters of a cross-shaped pool near Moscow.

For someone who was raised in the communist-atheist Soviet Union, it's hard to say how sincere this is and how much is about catering to Putin's hypernationalist agenda. Surveys show strong pro-Russian sentiment aligns with support for the church.

Still, there are some Putin certainties: documented facts that appear each year in Russia in the form of widely available Vladimir Putin calendars.

These calendars feature Putin in a variety of poses and show how he likes to fish, hunt and ride horses, preferably shirtless while in the wilds of Siberia. He likes motorcycles and rifles. In 2018's calendar, Mr. March (Putin) is seen sparring in a judo match.

A 'smart tactician'? A 'killer'?

"I looked the man in the eye," former President George W. Bush said after meeting with Putin in 2001. "I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul – a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."

Almost 20 years later, Bush clarified his remarks, telling Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo: "He’s a very smart tactician. The problem is, his whole attitude on most issues is, 'I’m going to win and the U.S. is going to lose.'"

Biden has been more direct, calling Putin a "killer," comments that Putin reacted to with either characteristic straightforwardness or terrifying ambiguity, depending on your view: "I wish him good health. I say this without irony, no jokes," Putin said.

When Biden and Putin met each other in Switzerland in June, Russia's leader described their meeting as "constructive" and the basis for the future cooperation.

Soon after, thousands of Russians troops started their long march toward Ukraine's borders.

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"Putin decides everything himself with a small group of officers who he trusts are not American spies," said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political scientist and former lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party.

Markov cited Russia's defense minister, Sergei Shoigu; director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin; and Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the National Security Council, as Putin's confidantes.

"He speaks to so few people, it's really hard to know what's going through (Putin's) mind," John Sawers, Britain's former intelligence chief, noted recently.

"My sense of the man is he wants to restore Russia's greatness," Sawers said, "but doesn't really have a plan to get there."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As Russia menaces Ukraine, Vladimir Putin remains a mystery