Michel Duclos
At the end of his lengthy meeting with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on February 7, President Macron said that his Russian counterpart appeared to have "changed." Putin seemed locked in the past, harping on about the same old grievances and appearing uninterested in possible solutions to the crisis that he himself had triggered a few weeks earlier over Ukraine.
The two men had not met since December 2019. What happened between then and the February meeting that could explain Putin's sudden "change"? Many observers have developed theories based on the Russian leader's increased isolation due to the pandemic. An excellent example of this was a New York Times article by Michael Zygar, a highly respected observer of Russia's internal politics, which was revealingly titled How Vladimir Putin Lost Interest in the Present. During this period, the Russian President largely stopped seeing most of his confidants and collaborators. Instead, he locked himself in tête-à-têtes with Yuri Kovalchuk, a longtime friend who has risen the ranks to become the most influential man in Putin’s entourage. According to Zygar, Kovalchuk—both an oligarch and an ideologue—subscribes to a worldview that combines "Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism."
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