The best one-line insight into Vladimir Putin I ever heard was from my friend’s father, a former Soviet dissident. A beatnik in 1960s Leningrad, he experienced at first hand the operating practices of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s feared security service. It was in the same organization that Putin spent the defining years of his youth, before he entered politics and embarked on his dizzying rise to the presidency. The Russian leader’s KGB past means he will always have the mindset of a spy, my friend’s father explained one evening. “Putin cannot be bent,” he said, “but he can be broken.”
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A view of the headquarters of the FSB security service, the successor to the KGB, in downtown Moscow on Nov. 16, 2018.
