“At the time, it was already very clear that his view of the world seemed frozen in time.” It is in these words that the former President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, describes Vladimir Putin, whom she met at the request of the Kremlin when she was at the head of the country.
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She met him in Austria, a neutral country, where Putin had gone skiing with his family, and thereby bought three military planes.
The former president vividly remembers Putin’s bitterness at watching the Soviet Union crumble.
“He was psychologically incapable of accepting the change in status caused by the collapse, the dismantling of the Soviet Union into a constituent republic. And yet, it wasn’t as tragic as that, what I tried to tell him! Russia was still a federation with a huge territory, and it had every chance to recover from the deplorable state from an economic and social point of view in which it found itself. That in the end we could be good neighbours, ”says the former president of the Baltic country on the 100% Nouvelles program on LCN.
According to her, Putin’s war in Ukraine is one of revenge.
“It is a revanchist and exceptionalist war by Russia. He often speaks of the humiliation that Russia suffered when the USSR collapsed, but it was not Russia that collapsed, it was the USSR that disappeared as a formation and whose countries constituents wanted to get rid of it at all costs!” explains Ms. Vike-Freiberga.
She points out that anything that is not written Moscow, as language or culture represents Nazism for Putin.
Regarding the difficulties that the Russian army seems to be facing on the ground, the Latvian ex-president declares bluntly: “I hope he is in despair! […]»
She believes that Putin could use all possible means to achieve his ends, including the use of chemical weapons.
“His mania for persecution and grandeur has reached such a level that he is perfectly capable of doing things unthinkable for a rational person. But he still retains a capacity for calculation, risks and benefits and I think he is smart enough to understand that it would be a very serious mistake on his part.
Latvia left the Soviet Union to become independent in 1991, joined the European Union in 2003, NATO in April 2003, and the Eurozone in 2014.