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  • The Atlantic

    I Was Wrong About Putin

    When U.S. intelligence started saying that Russia would invade Ukraine, I didn’t believe it.
    by Sergei Dobrynin Mar 08, 2022 4 minutes
    Source: Sergei Guneyev / Getty; The Atlantic

    In February 2000, I met my friend and mentor, the anthropologist Vladimir Arsenyev, for a beer in a musty St. Petersburg University cafeteria. We were talking politics, and we fell into a conversation about the upcoming presidential election, which Vladimir Putin was obviously bound to win. Putin had succeeded Boris Yeltsin after the latter’s resignation and was seeking his first full term in power.

    Arsenyev, then in his early 50s, was a fiery postcolonial leftist who hated the Soviet Union, but considered the emerging Russian mix of imperialism and capitalism to be even worse. He was not popular among his colleagues and was also disliked by some of his students who saw him as a kind of anti-corporate maverick.

    My political orientation was rather

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