Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Vladimir Putin's Alternate Reality

Angela Merkel is right when she says that Vladimir Putin is living in another world.

March 4, 2014 at 5:11 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Photographer: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

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The New York Times reports, third-hand, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone, worried that he was out of touch with reality, "in another world." To Russians and Ukrainians fearing a Kremlin-ordered military campaign, this sounded like evidence of something they have suspected since Putin asked the parliament for permission to send troops into Ukraine: That Putin is mad.

"Hypertoxic schizophrenia," political consultant Stanislav Belkovsky wrote in a post on Snob.ru, read by almost half a million people and re-posted almost 40,000 times on Facebook: "Putin actually decided he is a great man and can change the course of history."