[imagesource: CBS News]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been described as “the most dangerous man on the planet”.

Although, being recounted as such by a collection of women who were closest to his oligarch cronies, and saw firsthand how Putin’s hunger for power affected everything around him, is perhaps a little more startling.

That is precisely the hook of the new Paramount+ documentary, Secrets of the Oligarch Wives, which gathers insider commentary from the women whose lives were intertwined with the tyrant.

The 90-minute doccie comes out today and paints a portrait of a man willing to do anything, to anyone, to get exactly what he wants.

The two standout “oligarch wives” are Countess Alexandra Tolstoy (a distant relative of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy), who spent years alongside oligarch Sergei Pugachev, as well as Tatiana Fokina, the spouse of exiled cellphone oligarch Evgeny Chichvarkin.

There’s also a lot from financier and political activist Bill Browder, with a few claims corroborated by the still imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

We’re given a brief history lesson, showing where Putin began his rise in the ranks, gaining influence, affluence, and immense political power from the end of the Soviet Union right through to the war he’s waging on Ukraine. This is a moment that serves as the “latest and most heartbreaking example of Putin’s viciousness,” according to The Daily Beast.

That’s the thing with the documentary, it seems; it is less a revelation and more a reminder that the world is contending, according to everyone in the feature, with a “ruthless, greedy, sociopathic monster who cares only about his own power, wealth, and legacy as a titan who united and restored the glory of Mother Russia”.

We know the guy is fine with dishing out severe penalties for anyone who disobeyed his wishes, such as fatal poisonings, criminal prosecution, and the seizure of assets:

…life with Pugachev was a whirlwind of glamorous yachts and ritzy palaces, which she makes no bones about having loved—at least until Putin decided to turn on his former confidant and send him fleeing to France.

Fokina, meanwhile, didn’t meet Chichvarkin until after he had escaped Russia following Putin’s attempts to confiscate his empire and prosecute him for all manner of offenses…

Talk about Putin’s own humble upbringing, and later enthusiasm for living in the lavish Kremlin, are eventually fingered as potential reasons for his merciless tyranny…

But it will always be alarming to get outright confirmation that someone in such power has a little-man complex at least, and a severe mental illness at most:

Fokina surmises that Putin is willing to do anything because he’s secretly ill, while Browder suggests that he’s a mentally unwell madman who lacks empathy, a conscience, and normal human emotions—and has for his entire life.

Rumours about his ill-health have been consistent.

Here’s the trailer for the documentary:

Despite the “rather shallow documentary” showing Putin as a stone-faced creep in an unflattering light – a depiction that we are all quite used to by now – and mixing “well-publicized facts and scattered anecdotes to produce unenlightening results”, it is still quite something to hear and see how a psychopath likes to play.

[source:dailybeast]