Putin Has Been Overcome By Paranoia

• 17.08.2026, 16:05

Spreading its "canned goods" around the world—that's so Russian.

I was just reading in The New York Times.

No, there’s nothing new about paranoia itself.

But I’m still struck by it, because when you read about all these symptoms in such concentration, it’s impossible to consider it normal.

Investigators are spending time trying to determine whether TV footage of Putin is real—based on the degree of wilting in the plants in the shot.

The existence of his many identical residences has been known for a long time.

Now I’m reading about the presidential train with a pool, a spa, and a gym, which looks like an ordinary train from the outside. Does he just ride around in circles while swimming in the pool?

There are special railway lines and secret stations near his residences.

The huge motorcades cruising through Moscow actually serve as a kind of decoy, distracting the public from the leader’s whereabouts.

Television footage showing him meeting with disinfected members of the government or other henchmen from his inner circle is recorded several months in advance and then aired, pretending that it happened on that very day.

All journalists know what the word “canned footage” means in professional jargon (pre-recorded segments), but here “canned footage” is the main pro-Putin genre.

After all, spreading their “canned footage” around the world is so typically Russian.

In other words, the long white table during the COVID-19 pandemic and the constant quarantines for Putin’s lackeys are just the tip of the iceberg.

And this is an entire state apparatus, honed specifically to serve an old paranoid man. Hundreds of people have been participating in this for years.

Others have been watching it for years.

Here’s what’s striking: how natural all of this seems to Russians.

Erich Fromm, in *Escape from Freedom*, writes that the authoritarian personality, in its sadomasochistic tendencies, exhibits “extreme forms of helplessness,” and that their specific “courage” lies in “enduring whatever fate—or the leader as its embodiment—throws at them.”

That’s it.

I once recorded a conversation with psychiatrist Roman Kechur—it was March 2022.

And even back then, he was talking about his regression, about his descent into paranoid experiences: “We imagine him as strong, but he’s a terrified old retired KGB agent” (remember: March 2022).

I got so many comments under that post back then—saying things like, “How can you talk like that about such a formidable leader?” “Putin has outmaneuvered everyone again,” and so on.

But now, finally—for the most part—we haven’t seen anything there for a long time except paranoia.

And I think: what a wonderful sign it is—that none of this makes sense to us anymore.

It would be terrible if we took this for granted.

Tatyana Troshchinskaya, “Facebook”