Introduction

It’s been almost a year to the day of this writing that Vladimir Putin began his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: an attack described by him as an “emancipation” from Nazi satanists. He insisted that Russia’s forces would be greeted as liberators; a phrase vaguely, even eerily familiar. Psychiatrist and analyst Doctor Roman Kechur, in a lively interview included here, describes such reframing as a sociopath’s need to inflict trauma on those who “belong” to him. In Putin’s ever-threatened mind, Ukraine is an “upstart” attempting to exist autonomously, forgetting its key role in fulfilling his grandiose visions of empire. This mad would-be emperor attempts to destroy those who dare provoke him.

As Kechur puts it, “If you are a Ukrainian, it means for Putin that ‘you are a fascist.’ And if you are a fascist, you are to be destroyed.” Such narrative and literal violence also seems to befall many of Putin’s personal enemies, who are somehow quite clumsy around windows. Another element of Putin’s nihilistic power-grab stems from a frail yet ultimately sadistic inadequacy, given the idealized strongman he clearly longs to be, rather than the globally-enabled, psychopathic thug he really is.

Tyrants are threatened, as in any cult, by the individuation and agency of those whom s/he believes are rightfully “theirs”. This is but one reason Ukraine’s struggle is of such vital importance to those of us valuing emancipation, both micro and macro, in the consulting room and across nations: the freedom of pursuing one’s own way of thinking and living rather than enslavement to sociopolitical or familial thought-systems.

This, in other words, describes much of my clinical work: the “micro” version of the global atrocity continuing as I type, and one of the many reasons I was drawn to pursuing this project. I also have deep cultural and ancestral roots in Eastern Europe, including in the Czech Republic; my paternal grandfather’s birthplace is Lviv, formerly Poland but now western Ukraine