If you like that article you might like this interview with Garry Kasparov who sees someone like Putin as an enemy of the free world.
I've always seen Putin as a chess player but the chess player (Kasparov) sees him as a poker player.
Me and many of my colleagues, like the late Boris Nemtsov, have been telling people around the world that Vladimir Putin was our problem but, eventually, will be everybody’s problem because, as with every dictator, he will look for a global stage to boost his grip on power domestically. It was very natural for him to look at the United States as the ultimate prize for his dictator’s pride, to demonstrate that he’s so powerful, so invincible that he would defy the most powerful nation in the world.
question: Isn’t this just risky behavior, though? As you have said, nothing happens in Russia that’s important without Putin’s permission. I mean, to have his intelligence agencies not only hacking the Democratic National Committee and more generally speaking the democratic process for intelligence purposes, but to be actually intervening in the election—that surprises me as someone who wouldn’t expect better behavior of him. It just seems dangerous.
answer:
I think being a dictator for life is a risky business. You’re absolutely right: If you try to judge Putin and Putin’s actions from our perspective—we live in a free country now and we’re always looking forward, we’re trying to make strategic calculations—we’ll be judging him wrong because a dictator doesn’t care about strategy. At a certain point, it’s all about survival, it’s all about achieving my goals today. While he can make mistakes—because he doesn’t care about free press in his own country, there’s no parliament that could examine his actions—he knows there’s one deadly mistake that every dictator must avoid: He cannot afford to look weak.
Of course it’s risky to hack American institutions like leading parties, and even just to interfere with American elections—but it was inevitable because Putin made anti-Americanism and the challenge of America’s influence in the world a core of his domestic propaganda. He saw a big opportunity, because after so many years of weakness shown by Obama’s administration, Putin felt emboldened. That’s why I was sure he would do it, because I’ve read enough history books to learn that dictators—if they don’t stop at an early stage, they eventually go off-limits. Putin saw a big opportunity with Donald Trump and he grabbed this opportunity, and we know that this administration—Obama and the White House, the State Department, CIA—they received these reports and they tried to avoid an open conflict with Russia because, obviously, there are many arguments why you should avoid this conflict.
That was Putin’s precise calculation...........
