Putin’s mind is ‘sick and twisted and probably not logical,’ says US envoy to NATO

TVP World ^ | 8/4/2025 | Eliza Meller

[marcusmaximus]

The U.S. ambassador to NATO has said Russian President Vladimir Putin has a “sick and twisted and probably not logical” mind.

American diplomat Matthew Whitaker was speaking as President Donald Trump’s deadline for Moscow to make progress toward ending the war in Ukraine is set to expire on Friday.

“It is impossible to get into the mind of Vladimir Putin because it is sick and twisted, and probably not logical. But I’m guessing he doesn’t want to take on the most powerful military in the world, which is the United States of America,” Whitaker told right-wing U.S. television channel Newsmax TV on Sunday.

This comes as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to visit Moscow on Wednesday, according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.

Whitaker said in his interview that Witkoff would remind Russia of Trump’s ultimatum.

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

---" Putin has 4 days to end his invasion. " ( M&Ms -- on 8/4/2025 )

--- " Putin’s botched invasion of Ukraine is over. " ( 8 posted on 3/18/2025, 11:57:55 AM by marcusmaximus )

[Socon-Econ]

Kicking Russian corruption and influence out of Europe is certainly in American economic, political and moral interest.
*******
If the Europeans think that Russian influence over them is too great, they can deal with it themselves. We are not the world’s policeman.

Anyway, based on the European march toward self-destruction — right alongside the American left — the Europeans could do worse than to normalize relations with Russia.

[TBP]

To put it mildly.

[Widget Jr]

No and Yes. On the surface, for old style diplomatic diplomacy no matter what else is happening, this isn't a good look. That never works with Russia so there is no real loss.

Trump has reduced his 50 day ultimatum to 10. If this was an "approved off the cuff remark", it is sending a message to Putin before Wikoff arrives.

That message is Trump has had enough and is going to up the ante regarding Ukraine.

[Williams]

A news article was posted quoting a Trump administration official directly involved in this.

All you seem to offer are childish insults.

I support Trump. Those who don’t are worthless.

[ANKE69]

Yep!
A homo pig who runs through grocery stores and the streets with no clothes on, happily exposing himself to children, playing the piano with his tiny, little man, dresses up in queer homo latex outfits and high heels and is strutting around like a b*tch in heat, is truly sick and twisted and absolutely not logical.”
He is a sick POS.

What is even more twisted, are those who defend and make excuses for this pig, yet on other threads they play up the outrage and disgust when it comes to the sick drag queens, and how small children get exposed to these sick perverts.

[kiryandil]

The thing about FR clown-trolls like marcus and the Gaytor is you can’t embarrass them with examples of their extreme clown selves.

[kiryandil]

ohnoes! Billyams the zeeper seems to have soiled itself over your post!

[Peter ODonnell]

Tomorrow this Ukraine “special military operation” (sure Vlad whatever you say) will have been going on for 1,260 days and my one observation there would be, you don’t want to be messing around with end of world talk when you’re at 1,260 days into anything.

[McGruff]

"Putin has 4 days to end his invasion."

You're a funny guy.

[rdcbn1]

Well I guess a couple million people KIA or horribly wounded is a small price to pay for all the that winning

BTW, it looks like about 28000 to 30000 KIA a month in recent months so we are looking at about 150,000 KIA since people started obstructing Trumps peace initiatives

[The Duke]

..."said Russian President Vladimir Putin has a “sick and twisted and probably not logical” mind."

I must have missed that video.

I realize that "playground politics" might work domestically in the US, but I'm not sure it helps when dealing with Russia.

[Kazan]

There is nothing sick or twisted about wanting to protect one's only warm water naval base or protecting one's citizens from a NATO armed, funded and trained military on one's border.

There isn't a leader that loves his country that wouldn't do the same thing.

[marcusmaximus]

Your Putin has 4 days to end his invasion.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

And he has poopy pants!

[DesertRhino]

I guess to Washington DC in London she probably does look insane.. He has a consistent logical message and doesn’t bounce around from day today. He doesn’t lie and keeps his word. And he doesn’t like Nazis. I guess that does look pretty insane to Washington and London

[TexasGator]

“He doesn’t lie and keeps his word.”

He lies, steals and kills.

“And he doesn’t like Nazis”

First, it used the neo-Nazi threat to justify the adoption of anti-extremism legislation, a longstanding demand of some Russian liberals. Ultimately, this legislation would be used to prosecute Russian democrats.

Second, the Kremlin launched “managed nationalism”, an attempt to co-opt and mobilise radical nationalist militants, including neo-Nazis, as a counterweight to an emerging anti-Putin coalition of democrats and leftist radicals.

Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth organisation notorious for its campaign against postmodernist literature, made the first move by reaching out to OB88, the most powerful skinhead gang in Russia.

This cooperation expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called “Nashi”, or “Ours”.

As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.

During 2005, Nashi’s thugs staged a series of raids on anti-Putin youth groups. The most violent attack, which left four left-wing activists in hospital, led to the arrest of the assailants. They were released after a visit to the police station from Nikita Ivanov, the Kremlin functionary who supervised the regime’s loyalist youth organisations.

The resulting scandal provoked a reconfiguration of “managed nationalism”. While Nashi distanced itself from football gangs, its radical militants migrated to two rival Kremlin proxies, the nationalist “Young Russia” group and the anti-immigration “Locals” group. These organisations became bridges between the neo-Nazi subculture and the Kremlin.

Neo-Nazi leaders implicated in killings
As I demonstrated in a recent study of the Kremlin’s relationship with Russian fascists, these linkages made possible a bold experiment to create a pro-Putin neo-Nazi movement.

In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (“Russian Image”, or “RO” for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.

With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media.

Its leaders held televised public discussions with state functionaries and collaborated openly with Maksim Mishchenko, a member of parliament from the ruling party. Perhaps most shockingly, RO also hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin.

The problem for the Kremlin was that RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO’s production of a two-hour internet “documentary” titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime.

But they could not ignore the arrest on murder charges of Nikita Tikhonov, an ex-skinhead and cofounder of RO. Tikhonov was the leader of BORN (“Fighting Organisation of Russian Nationalists”), a terrorist group that committed a string of murders of public figures and antifa militants.

The victims included the renowned human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Tikhonov was convicted of their murders in 2011.

The police investigation revealed that Goryachev regarded BORN and RO as the armed and political platforms of a neo-Nazi insurgency, on the model of the IRA and Sinn Féin in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The court materials show that as Goryachev was reporting to his Kremlin supervisors, he was also advising Tikhonov about the choice of murder victims. Goryachev was found guilty in 2015 of ordering the murders of numerous people, including Markelov.

The adverse publicity wrecked the careers of some of the Kremlin’s Nazi promoters, but veterans of RO flourished in the propaganda institutions of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.

One of them is Anna Trigga, who worked for the Internet Research Agency, the trolling factory that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and tried to foment anti-Muslim hatred in Australia. Another is Andrei Gulyutin, editor of the website Ridus, an important platform of pro-Putin Russian nationalism.

Promoting neo-Nazis overseas
No less important is the role of neo-Nazis and other right-wing figures in Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine.

In 2014, RO’s Aleksandr Matyushin helped to terrorise supporters of the Ukrainian state in Donetsk on the eve of Russia’s proxy war in eastern Ukraine. He went on to become a major field commander.

Today, RO’s Dmitrii Steshin, a celebrated war correspondent for a mass circulation tabloid, disseminates lies blaming Ukrainian false-flag operations for atrocities committed by

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russias-long-history-of-neo-nazis

[DesertRhino]

Putin had the same position since 2008. He’s never lied about his intention, and gave plenty of warning when we were violating actual red lines. (something that the DC/London axis has no idea another country can have)

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to seduce him one week, trying to flatter him the next, trying to bully him the week after that, tariffs one day, secondary tariffs the next… And angry social media posts at all hours of the day. And Putin is on stable. Got it.

[lodi90]

BTW, it looks like about 28000 to 30000 KIA a month in recent months so we are looking at about 150,000 KIA since people started obstructing Trumps peace initiatives

---

Absolutely. The biggest country in the world genocidally erasing the second biggest country in Europe is an ugly thing. Yet still the Ukrainian people have their country and their identity seprate from the filth and mass murder of the Russian World.

[Jan_Sobieski]

I went to college with Matt Whitaker. This emotional display of his is not wise.