Putin as junkie madman might help explain invasion

It was my wife Tina who noticed it first, a couple of weeks ago. Her father Charl, a clever, gentle man whom we all loved, was addicted to steroids – a doctor ‘friend’ started him off on whole-body doses for asthma about 50 years ago – and over time his face had puffed up a bit in the usual way. She said she could see the same changes in Vladimir Putin’s face.

Out of curiosity, we went back and looked at earlier pictures of Putin, and we thought we could see the same phenomenon.

He’s obviously been a bodybuilder for much of his life, and many, perhaps most bodybuilders, take steroids at some point. And some long-term steroid users, including Tina’s father (although he wasn’t a bodybuilder), get hooked.

To be frank, Charl became a steroid junkie, which we first realized after his suitcase got lost when we took him on a trip to Russia, of all places. It was a classic junkie panic: he couldn’t think of anything else until he had his steroids again. I deserved a medal for finding him steroids without a prescription in Moscow in one day, but I never got one.

I wish I had paid more attention to Tina’s remark about Putin, but instead I went on predicting that Putin would not invade Ukraine until only a few days before he did, on the grounds that no rational leader, however ruthless, would do that. He might bluff about doing it, but actually doing it held nothing but downsides for Putin, and he wasn’t stupid.

I even wrote: ‘The problem for the target audience, the onlookers, and sometimes the leader’s own associates, is that they cannot tell the difference between a ‘madman’ act and the actions of a genuine madman unless the ruler actually does something irrevocable and plainly crazy. We’re not there yet with Vladimir Putin.’ And I really didn’t think he was crazy.

So he invaded. Three days later I heard Lord David Owen, former UK secretary of state for foreign affairs but also an experienced medical doctor trained in neurology and psychology, telling Radio London that he had spotted the same puffiness as Tina in Putin’s face, and had reached the same conclusion. But he then went a bit farther.

“Look at his face, see how that has changed,” Owen said. “He now has an oval face. People said ‘Oh, it’s plastic surgery or Botox’, but I don’t believe that at all. He’s on either anabolic steroids as a bodybuilder – and he’s very proud of his muscles and strips to the waist and everything like that – or he’s on corticosteroids.

“If you’re on these drugs, they give you this face. They reduce your immunity and make you more vulnerable to COVID. This man has been in complete isolation, quite extraordinary, won’t see anybody, stays miles away, tremendous pressures. Which indicates he’s on a steroid and probably, maybe, a combination of both.”

As television diagnoses go, that’s pretty convincing. And it would explain a lot: not just the 15-metre tables with him at one end and his generals at the other, but also the invasion of Ukraine. Anabolic steroids are associated with increased irritability and aggression; corticosteroids are sometimes linked to mania