A Thursday piece in the Financial Times marking one year since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin launched his bloody attempt at conquering Ukraine strongly implies that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov believes Putin has conversations with the ghosts of long dead Imperial monarchs.
“He has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great,” Lavrov reportedly told an oligarch shortly after the famous February 2022 meeting where he told them to shut the fuck up and deal with sanctions he knew were coming after the war started.
The piece also quotes Putin trying to find a silver lining to the shitshow. “It turns out we were completely unprepared. The army is a mess. Our industry is a mess. But it’s good that we found out about it this way, rather than when NATO invades us,” Putin has said to members of his inner circle, according to a former Kremlin official quoted by the Financial Times.