House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that she had spoken with people who believed Russian President Vladimir Putin was suffering from some physical ailment like cancer or “brain fog” as the result of COVID-19.
Pelosi spoke with MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell ahead of President Joe Biden’s first official State of the Union Address, and she was asked to weigh in on whether something deeper was behind Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
WATCH:
Pelosi is asked to speculate about whats going on with Putin:
"Some people say he has cancer, and some people say brain fog from COVID. Other people just think he's a complete raging bully. But whatever it is, the people of Ukraine are paying the price for it." pic.twitter.com/LVCxnaKtX0
— The Recount (@therecount) March 1, 2022
“I don’t know what is the matter there,” Pelosi began. “I’ve talked to head of state who have met with him, and they just take at face value the evil that he is putting forth is something that we have to deal with, they’re not making a diagnosis of his health.”
Pelosi went on to suggest that they were still speculating about whether or not there was an underlying cause, adding, “Some people say he has cancer, and some people say brain fog from COVID. Other people just think he’s a complete raging bully. But whatever it is, the people of Ukraine are paying the price for it.”
The White House has also openly questioned Putin’s mental state, according to a Tuesday report from The Hill:
Experts, analysts, lawmakers and even administration officials have speculated that Putin’s isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic has raised his paranoia. They’ve pointed to decisions he’s made such as the invasion itself and his move on Sunday to put his nuclear forces on alert in suggesting he is not making rational decisions.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki spoke with ABC News on Monday, saying, “I’m not going to make an assessment of his mental stability, but I will tell you, certainly the rhetoric, the actions, the justification that he’s making for his actions are certainly deeply concerning to us.”
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has also hinted that there might be more than meets the eye with regard to Putin’s stability — and he said it was starting to become visible in recent videos that showed the Russian president outwardly showing anger and frustration.
“The one thing Vladimir Putin has always valued is emotional control, is the ability to never flash any emotion, and to watch a video of him the other night and those flashes of anger, that’s very uncharacteristic,” Rubio said Monday, adding, “We have to understand that whatever we think he might have done, or assumed he would do in response to actions 10 or 15 years ago, is not what he might do today, and that’s an important thing to take into account. This is a very dangerous moment, in my opinion, because of that.”
Former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said his concern was that Putin had spent many years effectively consuming his own propaganda.
“I’m nervous that Mr. Putin has been believing his propaganda for decades,” McFaul told NBC News on Sunday. “I sat in the room with him for five years when I worked in the Obama administration. I speak Russian. I listened to him and I know what he says, he’s increasingly unhinged.”