For a quarter-century, the West has built up a myth about Vladimir Putin. He is described as a cunning ex-KGB operative, a grand strategist, a master negotiator.
It's all nonsense.
He is a thug who happened to inherit a massive, nuclear-armed country with enough size and resources to make even his blunders survivable.
The KGB Myth
Start with the résumé.
Yes, Putin was in the KGB. But not anywhere near the top.
He was not running operations in Washington or London. He was a mid-level officer in Dresden, East Germany — the backwater of a backwater, essentially middle management.
When the Berlin Wall fell, he wasn't orchestrating events. He was in the basement, frantically burning files.
That is not the biography of a super-spy. It's the biography of a bureaucrat who later repackaged his past into mystique.
A Thug With Scale
What Putin really had was luck: he rose at a moment when Russia's democracy was fragile, its institutions hollow, and its people exhausted by the chaos of the 1990s. They were dealing with rampant organized crime, economic collapse, and terrorism — it was like living in Chicago during Prohibition.
He was good-looking, athletic, and seemed strong after years of elderly, declining leaders.
His KGB background was supposed to signal cunning and competence, and he had the additional fortune of rallying the country around terrorism threats that made his authoritarian instincts look necessary.
He offered stability to a public conditioned by nearly a century of authoritarian rule, and he seized control of the security services.
Once in power, he didn't need brilliance. He had an understanding of KGB security services to control the inside and nuclear weapons that guarantee any Russian leader a permanent seat at the table, a giant resource-rich country that cushions even catastrophic mistakes, and a population trained by history to accept strongman politics as "normal."
The Blunders Tell the Truth
Look past the myth and the record speaks for itself.
Putin spent decades trying to control Ukraine through classic KGB methods: bribing elites, spreading propaganda, infiltrating security services, installing puppet leaders. All of it failed. His final puppet was run out of the country in 2014.
When even the spy techniques he was supposedly trained in didn't work, he resorted to the crude annexation of Crimea, which brought years of sanctions that weakened Russia's economy.
When his quick-collapse fantasy in Ukraine didn't happen in 2022, he launched a full-scale invasion that turned into a disaster.
He supposedly needed to act to keep NATO away. Instead of dividing NATO, he unified it and drove Finland and Sweden into the alliance, putting NATO forces directly on Russia's border.
Instead of folding Ukraine, he gave it a stronger national identity.
Instead of making Russia more powerful, he turned it into Beijing's junior partner.
Beyond these tactical failures lies a deeper indictment: Putin has built a kleptocracy that has squandered Russia's potential. While the rest of the world focuses on productive innovation and economic development, Russia can do little more than sell oil that flows freely from the ground.
A country with vast human capital and natural resources has been reduced to a glorified gas station, its brightest minds fleeing abroad while its leadership dedicates resources to futile imperial fantasies.
This isn't the work of a strategic mastermind.
It's the predictable result of putting a country in the hands of what the Russians call a жулик — a low-class petty criminal who survives by intimidation and deceit.
The Russians have a special word for such people because they have a long history with them and their behavior is very recognizable.
Why the Myth Persists
So why does the image of Putin the mastermind endure?
Because it flatters everyone else.
Western politicians would rather say they were outsmarted than admit they were naive. They convinced themselves that Russia wanted to be part of the world order, having been finally freed from the ruinous world created by Stalin. They were willing to bend over backward to help welcome them and to be understanding. They could not imagine that they were instead just dealing with an amateur historian stuck in the past, masquerading as a rewriter of the mistakes of a bygone era.
Media outlets prefer the story of the cunning villain to the boring truth.
The Real Lesson
Putin is just the latest in a long Russian tradition of strongmen who mistake brutality for strategy.
Like Stalin before him — who also survived catastrophic blunders through sheer state power rather than tactical brilliance — he endures not because of genius but because Russia is too big and too resource-rich to collapse quickly.
His power doesn't prove his intelligence.
It proves how dangerous large authoritarian states can be when they are tolerated by a world order that wishes they were something else.
Stop calling Putin a mastermind. He wasn't a master spy, he isn't a grand strategist, and he isn't a brilliant negotiator.
He's a thug who has ruined and squandered the future of his own country and been an unproductive disruptor on the world stage for decades.