“Putin wants to show the world that he is not a small man”

Frankfurt Nina Khrushcheva is horrified. “I thought Vladimir Putin wasn’t crazy. But I was wrong. He’s crazy,” says the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in an interview with the Handelsblatt.

Although she believes that there are rational people around him, she fears that they have little influence. “These are all one-man decisions,” she says. But she still cannot imagine how Russia should control Ukraine as an occupying power in the long term. “It’s like Afghanistan,” she says. This country had to leave Russia in 1989, having exercised dominant influence there since 1973.