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Chapter 26: The Irrelevance of Monsieur Putin

The handover took place on a windswept military airfield, a sterile exchange under a grey sky. He was escorted from a dark Russian van to a waiting ICC transport plane. A file was exchanged. A clipboard was signed. As the plane took off, he looked out the window at the receding Russian landscape. My land. My sky, he thought, a surge of pure, impotent rage washing over him. They are taking me from my own country like a common thief.

The landing in The Hague was a descent into a different kind of hell. The raw, violent chaos of Kresty-2 was replaced by the silent, clinical sterility of the Scheveningen detention unit. The light in the corridors was a soft, constant, shadowless glow. The air was filtered, silent, and temperature-controlled. It was the absolute indifference of the place that was terrifying. It was a prison that did not even grant him the dignity of being hated.

In the processing center, he was logged, numbered, and examined. In his solitary cell, there were no menacing cellmates to fear, but no one to command, either. There was only the profound, unnerving silence. And in that silence, his mind, with nowhere else to run, began its furious, desperate work of self-justification.

He paced the small cell, a caged animal, his thoughts a raging torrent of blame. He blamed the oligarchs. “Traitors! I made them billionaires. And they turned on me, for what? So their children could attend parties in London? They were merchants, not builders of an empire!”

He blamed his generals. “Fools and cowards! Volodin assured me Kyiv would fall in three days. They were weak. They lied to me.” He conveniently edited out the memory of his own role in creating the culture of fear that had made truthful reporting impossible.

He even, in his darkest moments, blamed the Russian people themselves. “The mothers… crying. Soft. They have forgotten what it means to build an empire. Ungrateful.”

Days of this passed, a circular, internal tirade. Then, one morning, as he was staring at his own haggard, grey face in the small steel mirror above the sink, a new and horrifying question broke through the wall of his rage. It was a simple, logical, and utterly devastating question.

“But… if they were all so weak, so incompetent, and so cowardly… why did I choose them? Why did I keep them in power for twenty years?”

The question shattered him. It was not a flicker of remorse. It was a sudden, sickening vertigo of culpability. The entire edifice of his reign—the corrupt officials, the sycophantic generals, the lying spies—was not a system that had failed him. It was a system he had meticulously, personally, built. He was the architect of his own ruin. This thought, the ultimate narcissistic wound, was more terrifying than any prison. The idea that history would remember him not as a great, tragic Tsar, but as an incompetent fool who had built a house of cards.

His first meeting with his court-appointed lawyer was a disaster. The lawyer, a sharp Frenchman named Dubois, wanted to discuss the legal case. But the former President was now obsessed with a different trial: the one taking place in his own mind, the trial for his legacy.

“They were incompetent!” he found himself hissing at the bewildered lawyer. “All of them! I was surrounded by fools and traitors! The plan was sound, but the instruments were weak!”

Dubois listened patiently, then responded with a statement of cold, hard, legal reality. “Monsieur Putin, that may be. But the law has a concept: ‘command responsibility.’ The captain is responsible for the actions of his crew, especially if he is the one who appointed them.” He gestured to the thick file on the table. “My job is not to argue about the competence of your former ministers. It is to defend you against the specific charge of the abduction of thousands of children. Shall we begin?”

The former President recoiled as if struck. Command responsibility. The lawyer’s words were the final, legalistic nail in the coffin of his blame-shifting. He had run out of enemies. He had run out of traitors. He was left alone, in the silence, with the one person he could no longer escape: himself.

The Discourse, 26: The Irrelevance of Monsieur Putin

Section 26.1: The "Cold" vs. "Hot" Prison: A Hierarchy of Hell
This chapter provides a stark contrast in the philosophy of punishment. Kresty-2 was a "hot" prison, a place of direct, physical brutality and primal fear. The Hague is a "cold" prison. Its power lies not in violence, but in procedure, sterility, and, most terrifyingly for its inmate, indifference. A man like the former President understands and can even respect the logic of the hot prison, which is a microcosm of the power dynamics he himself mastered. The cold prison is an alien world. Its quiet, orderly, bureaucratic process is a form of psychological torture for him because it refuses to acknowledge his exceptionalism. It signals that he is no longer important enough to even be brutalized; he is simply a case file to be processed.

Section 26.2: The Implosion of the Narcissistic Worldview
The internal monologue in this chapter charts the classic implosion of a malignant narcissist who has been stripped of all external validation ("narcissistic supply"). The initial phase is a furious externalization of blame, a desperate attempt to protect the ego by projecting all failures onto others (the oligarchs, the generals). The critical turning point is the moment of forced self-reflection: "Why did I choose them?" This is not an expression of remorse for the harm done to others. It is the ultimate narcissistic injury: the horrifying realization that his own choices are the source of his failure, that he is not a victim of betrayal, but the architect of his own incompetence. For such a personality, the thought of being remembered as a "fool" is a punishment far more profound than being remembered as a "monster."

Section 26.3: "Command Responsibility" as the Final Mirror
The lawyer’s introduction of the legal principle of "command responsibility" is the final, devastating blow. It is the legal system's formal refutation of the autocrat's primary defense: the ability to blame subordinates. The doctrine holds that the leader is ultimately responsible for the actions of those he commands, and even more so, for the system he creates. Dubois, by invoking this, becomes the final "mirror," forcing the former President to confront the fact that even if his claims of his subordinates' incompetence were true, he is still, in the eyes of the law and of history, solely and absolutely responsible. It is the checkmate move in his internal game of blame-shifting, leaving him with no one left to hold accountable but himself.