Former Moscow correspondent pens blistering op-ed cataloging 'horrifying clues' about Putin's state of mind

With all that is transpiring in Ukraine, many have questioned Russian President Vladamir Putin's mental state. Now, a former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal is offering an assessment of Putin's insanity.

In an op-ed published by The Daily Beast, A. Craig Copetas shared "glimpses into Putin’s inner sanctum" as he noted that they "offer horrifying clues about the state of mind of the man with his finger on the nuclear button."

"Is President Putin clinically insane? Is he choreographing madness and threats of a nuclear holocaust to frighten the West? Or does Putin know precisely what he’s doing? The questions are reasonable, but ultimately unanswerable," he wrote. "There is a data point, however: Russian and German scientists at Moscow’s aptly named Research Institute of the Brain in 1925 sliced and diced 30,953 sections of Vladimir Lenin’s cytoarchitecture for indications of genius."

"He is desperately trying to recapture a romanticized heyday," Copetas wrote.

Referencing the words of Byzantine and Russian historian Henry Hopwood-Phillips, Copetas noted that Putin appears to be stuck in a time warp reverting the country back hundreds of years with his way of thinking. “The tsar and the patriarch are meant to occupy the same body and the same mystical mind," Hopwood-Phillips said. "That’s the anvil of Russia’s domestic Byzantine statecraft.”

“Putin looks to be suffering deep melancholy,” reckons Hopwood-Phillips. “His consciousness is still floating in the 17th century, and 44 million Ukrainians are paying the price.”

To make matters worse, Russian politicians appear to operate in a similar fashion. Copetas went on to highlight Vladimir Yerofeyev's remarks about the forms of manipulation imposed on citizens by Russian politicians.

“'Russian politicians excel in making people everywhere believe in things which are not real,' Yerofeyev once explained over dinner during my years as a correspondent in Moscow," Copetas wrote. "Yerofeyev should know. He was Joseph Stalin’s translator and no slouch when it came to triggering the trickery Russian leaders use to rally public support to exorcise Western criticism."

Adding to the manipulation, Copetas notes that "Putin’s hammer is wielded by God;" an argument presumably made to justify the unrest currently erupting in Ukraine.

He wrote:

“'Let God save the Russian soil,' Putin’s Patriarch Kirill earlier this week on TV told his flock of 90 million devout parishioners. 'When I say Russian, I use an ancient expression from the chronicles of where Russian soil started, which includes the Ukraine and Belarus. God forbid,' Kirill thundered, “that the evil forces that have always fought against the unity of Russia and the Russian church get the upper hand in brotherly Ukraine.”