Former US Defense Intel Agent Reveals Putin's Childhood Experience with a Cornered Rat Could Be Guiding His Actions Now
To explain the dark labyrinths of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s mind, a former Defense Intelligence Agency agent talks about rats.
Rebekah Koffler, author of the book “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America,” said one key to Putin’s thinking is that he feels that he is “cornered like a rat,” according to Fox News.
She said an anecdote contained in Putin’s autobiography “First Person” is a key to Putin’s outlook. In the anecdote, Putin wrote that he one day chased a large rat into a corner while walking through a rat-infested apartment building that was his childhood home in Leningrad.
When the rat could not retreat, it attacked, forcing Putting to run, the story went. Koffler said that story was used to show that Putin learned the lesson of fighting back.
“He wants people to know that when cornered, he will be fighting,” Koffler told Fox. “He will not be surrendering.”
Koffler said Putin misread two key things – the will of Ukraine to resist and the ability of social media to rally much of the world to Ukraine’s cause.
“He definitely miscalculated and now he feels that he’s trapped because he has to execute this operation and reach his goal,” told Fox.
Koffler said the battle is not for Ukraine alone.
“They know it’s not about who controls Ukraine at all,” she told Fox. “It’s about who controls Eurasia and who controls the world. This is why you see Putin fighting for his life, for survivability.”
Koffler, who was born and raised in Russia during the days of the Soviet Union before coming to the United States, according to her Amazon biography, said that is why Ukraine’s survival means nothing to Putin, only its capitulation.
“He will run his troops into the ground,” Koffler told Fox, adding that Putin will “level Kyiv” if that is “what he needs to do.”
Ukrainian marines with what looks like a destroyed Russian tank and two BTR-82 in Mariupol. https://t.co/MyDOEYszOb pic.twitter.com/OXQsB2ZKgb
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 13, 2022
In a commentary piece published Saturday in the New York Post, Koffler wrote that regime change efforts that led to the downfall and deaths of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Quaddafi led Putin him to fear that he would be next, believing that the United States would topple him as he believed it toppled those leaders.
“When he hears U.S. leaders’ claims that he is a mentally deranged madman or that American officials are calling for revolt among members of his inner circle, he sees himself as the cornered rat. This is why, instead of ratcheting down the conflict in Ukraine and seeking a settlement with [Ukraine President Volodomyr] Zelensky, Putin is still lashing out at the West, threatening nuclear warfare,” she wrote.
Putin, she wrote “chooses brutality over submission, even if he has to annihilate Ukrainians, bomb maternity hospitals, and erase Ukraine from the map. With his survival now at stake, this rat will strike anything in its path to get out of its corner.”
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