We all know that drugs, whether legal or illegal, can have a profound effect on our minds. According to an interview with the head of the Russia division at the Danish Defence Intelligence Service, it’s possible that the treatment Putin is getting for thyroid cancer has turned him into a megalomaniac.

Almost since the Ukraine war began, Jeff Dunetz has been citing reports claiming that Putin is an extremely sick man, almost certainly suffering from and being treated for thyroid cancer. Now, Dunetz writes that the Danish newspaper Berlingske was able to score an interview with “Joakim,” a high-level Danish military intelligence official for FE (aka the Danish Defence Intelligence Service) specializing in Russia.

Image: Putin. YouTube screen grab.

Joakim contends there’s a very good chance that Putin’s megalomania comes from the drugs that are keeping him alive. From the English language version of Berlingske:

Joakim can’t say everything he knows.

And what he can say, he doesn’t necessarily know with any complete certainty.

But in his estimate, one of the factors that triggered the biggest war in Europe since World War Two was likely the medication that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was taking at the time.

“Delusions of grandeur are one of the known side effects of the type of hormone treatment that he was on,” Joakim states.

“It’s not something I can say for certain, but I think it did affect his decisions when he launched the war in Ukraine.”

That theory would explain some things, although not all things. Putin has long been possessive of Eastern Ukraine and worried about having NATO on his western flank. With Biden pushing for Ukraine to join NATO, that would have triggered all of Putin’s insecurities. After all, he already invaded Ukraine in 2014, on Obama’s watch (they always invade on Democrats’ watches), when he wasn’t on any anti-cancer drugs.

Where this theory does fit in is with the fact that the war, which most thought would end in weeks, has dragged on for months. Again, from Berlingske:

The intelligence service, FE, originally thought the Russians would win the war in two weeks.

“And they were close,” he says.

FE were fully aware of major problems in the Russian army with corruption, mismanagement and slow logistics.

But the Russians were fully aware of this themselves and so were able to make the necessary adjustments. This isn’t why the invasion failed.

Today it is evident that the key unknown factor was Putin’s poor decision-making.

“We put a lot of the blame for this on Putin’s shoulders,” Joakim says.

Putin has been micromanaging the war and doing so very badly—a level of incompetence that’s possibly because of drugs.

The idea isn’t that far-fetched. There’s a theory that Hitler did the same. He was a fascist who went from initial triumphs to complete disaster, bringing the Third Reich down with him, because his drug habit led him to a megalomania that saw him micromanaging the war and making terrible decisions (e.g., instituting the Holocaust and invading Russia, both of which fatally weakened the German military).

In Hitler’s case, it’s on record that his doctor was feeding him a bizarre medical cocktail of amphetamines (which also fueled the entire German military for the Blitzkrieg), morphine, bull semen, and rat poison. I’m not sure about the bull semen, but it’s pretty darn sure that speed, morphine, and rat poison will affect a person’s mental function. Moreover, drug abuse, whether taken illegally or from a doctor, will destroy people’s moral compass.

Having said that, both Hitler and Putin were fascists from the get-go, men driven by the lust for power and conquest and, in Hitler’s case, by genocidal hatred. The only difference the drugs seem to have made is that they turned both men into incompetent fascists. For once, it seems we should be thankful for drug addiction, which apparently has the salutary effect of weakening a tyrant’s ability to wage war.