Putin Is Now Russia’s Deluder-in-Chief
Six months into the war, Russia's president is clearly the deceiver, not the deceived, about the conflict’s stalemate.
He knows what he doesn’t want you to know.
Photographer: Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
The story of fake villages erected by Count Grigory Potemkin to impress his lover, Empress Catherine II, was first published by Georg von Helbig, a Saxon diplomat whose biography of Potemkin came out in the final years of the 18th century. Helbig didn’t accompany Catherine on her journey south, through territory that Potemkin claimed for the Russian empire — in a part of today’s Ukraine near Kherson that has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war launched by Vladimir Putin. But the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and a number of other European dignitaries did travel with Catherine, and they noted no such fake Potemkin villages, so there’s no credible evidence to support the story. On the other hand, nor is there any decisive proof that it was untrue.
Be that as it may, the powerful image created by von Helbig, likely from St. Petersburg rumors of the time, has provided one of the more popular explanations of why Putin’s war in Ukraine has taken its current plodding course — and why Russia’s economy appears to be weathering unprecedented Western sanctions so cheerfully. In the contemporary rendition of the myth, Putin is both Catherine, on the receiving end of the illusion, and Potemkin, its creator-in-chief. Yet, six months into the snail-paced invasion, it’s no longer possible for him to play both roles.