Putin and Kadyrov’s Chechens in the Ukraine Act I The Maternal Drama

The Ukraine – The 9/11 of Europe

In August 2014 I was sponsored by IsraAID, to teach for one week on the psychology of terrorism and early childhood development, at a newly established crisis center in the Ukraine. I had been there before and like many Ashkenazi Jews the Ukraine may also mean family roots. Professor Emeritus Amatzia Baram of Haifa University had put forward my name to the organizer of the seminar. I had met Professor Baram while in training to deploy to Helmand Province Afghanistan in Leavenworth, Kansas in 2008-2009 at which time my first book The Banality of Suicide Terrorism was also at press. In 2014 the situation was not good to say the least as Russia “annexed” Crimea ripping it away from the Ukraine.

Today the horror of Russia’s brutal vicious cancellation of the Ukraine has been called the 9/11 of Europe, the ultimate terrorist act. The scholar and founder of The Library of Social Science, Richard Koenigsberg wrote:

I don't know much about Russia and Ukraine. But let's use the proper terms to describe what happened. Warfare occurs when one nation feels it is necessary to defend itself against another nation. This was no such thing. Ukraine posed no threat to Russia.

THIS WAS A TERRORIST ATTACK. Much like Bin Laden's attack on the World Trade Center. Newsletter email 1 March 2022.

President Zelensky also used the term – terror attack:

‘Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget,’ . . . [he] vowed after Tuesday’s bloodshed on the central square in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. He called the attack on the square ‘frank, undisguised terror’ and a war crime. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/zelensky-says-kharkiv-missile-strikes-are-undisguised-terror/

Labeling the "anschuloss" of the Ukraine a terror act lays bare Putin’s unconscious psychodynamics of his sadistic barbaric mind in plain sight. It also exposes the crude violent mental states of his “mini-me” Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator install by him. The behavior is remarkably transparent if one can move beyond the surface and discover a violent psychotic maternal palimpsest. Cf. my blog on the palimpsest in terrorism here: https://www.nancykobrin.org/post/is-there-a-palimpsest-hidden-in-the-islamic-suicide-attack

Putin’s World-In-Reverse: What Is Good Is Bad And What Is Bad Is Good

I whatsapped a group and said that Putin thinks he is God. A colleague wrote back and said – no he is the Devil. I did not enter into a discussion at that moment but the point is this: In Putin’s paranoid world -- he is God Omnipotent. However, his world is a “world-in-reverse.” What does this mean? It is the world of the terrorist. In his world what we would consider good, he considers bad and what he considers bad, we consider good. It’s very confusing and disorganizing if you do not live in a psychotic world. Nevertheless, once you begin to decode the behavior using this very simple rule of “what is good is bad” it becomes much easier to make sense out of such psychotic annihilating behavior.

People Are Objects Not People

Putin does not care about people because they are merely objects to him like Lego blocks. They are expendable – his Russian troops, his Chechen troops, Ukrainians, men, women, children, the elderly, they are all to be obliterated. They are not people with needs. This, too, is often hard for lay people to understand – that Putin and Kadyrov can “look” normal but they are not normal. They have a cognitive deficit to put it mildly. Their brains failed to develop empathy during the critical maternal attachment period and this is why Putin didn’t hesitate to attack Babi Yar the Holocaust Memorial, a maternity hospital and all other civilian facilities.

Putin is not just seeking to take over Ukraine rather his efforts are for complete annihilation of anything Ukrainian and also, by extension, I contend anything Jewish. I do not think it should be overlooked, underestimated nor minimized that Putin specifically went after Zelensky the Jew. It is truly an insidious antisemitism. Putin is apparently very conflicted about Jews.

The Attack on a Ukrainian Maternity Hospital

In fact, it is the theme of the maternity hospital that catches one’s attention again as well as the reading of an sms by a Russian soldier to his mother before he died about the murder of civilians https://www.timesofisrael.com/russian-soldiers-alleged-text-to-his-mother-weve-targeting-civilians/

The mother is the underlying palimpsest driving Putin’s behavior. Putin bonds violently to the Ukrainian people. Bonding is learned in the first experience in life with the mother. This is the make it or break it time; the time for developing empathy or madness. Putin somewhat symbiotically shares his reverse world with his lackey Ramzan Kadyrov. Chechen culture thrives on violence which functions as a mask for fragile mental states. Violence is manly and therefore in Chechnya LGBT are persecuted because they are seen as Other, the vilified Mother who arouses needs and desires, what they really desire.

The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi*

But this is not the first attack on a maternity hospital as an act of terrorism. It also happened in Russia by the Chechens. In 2013 Jason Aronson, the publisher of psychology books, invited me to write a book for his then new website www.psychologybooks.org. He said to choose any subject concerning terrorism. I had had a long-standing interest in the Chechens since the Moscow Theater attack in 2002. Aronson’s invitation came right after the Boston Marathon attack on April 15, 2013 which was carried out by Tamerlan and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who had been identified as Chechen Kyrgystani-Americans. However, it had been the Budyonnovsk Maternity Hospital Hostage Crisis (June 14-19, 1995 ) that revealed the transparency of such a psychotic state as a displaced attack on the mother.

Shamil Basayev led the attack entailing a mass-hostage taking, literally and violently attaching to others. I wrote the following:

Basayev equated his psychotic fantasies with reality. Imagine little boys in pre- school building a tower out of blocks and then taking another block and knocking the tower down. These children are learning how to master their aggression and rage. But even more important is that they are playing and discovering the difference between play and reality. Basayev never played, we can surmise, because he took his fantasies to be real. The internal object of the maternal cameo becomes projected outward onto innocent targets, basically mothers and children. The violence escalated from attacks on a maternity hospital to a theater [Moscow] and then to a school [Beslan]. The locations and targets reveal the nature of the object whose fragmented parts temporarily re-create a fusion with the maternal cameo, which is then shattered by the attacks. The attacks are like splitting the atom by fission. One attack is not sufficient because Basayev’s rage was so psychotically excessive. p. 107

As I reread what I wrote back then, we can see how Putin, too, has escalated in his psychotic world to place his nuclear arsenal on high alert. One “annexation” such as Crimea only whet his appetite for more. His blind rage mushrooms like a foreboding nuclear cloud.

What Role Do Kadyrov’s Chechens Play in Putin’s Maternal Drama?

Briefly the Chechens have become the supreme carrier and emblem of his rage, a rage that exceeds murder itself with annihilation following it. On February 24, 2022 with Russia’s assault, I said to myself – “here come the Chechens.” Several articles have already been written about the Chechens but none delve into the psychosis.

While Chechens are fighting on both sides of the war. https://themedialine.org/top-stories/chechens-are-fighting-on-both-sides-of-russian-ukrainian-conflict/ it is Putin’s Chechens that prop-up his reverse world. They are the carriers of his aggression in a distinctly concrete way. It is not simply that the Chechens have a reputation of being brutal jihadis, it is more that Putin could create a special terrorism theatre of the absurd by having the Chechens tasked with the assassination of Zelensky – pitting Muslims against Jews as if it were being played out in a Roman like amphitheater. Again, it is the maternal drama writ larger than life but in blood. It is the effect of the reverse world syndrome. Psychopaths are always very, very clever people. They precipitate in us dissociative states so that we don’t really see what is going on in the maternal drama.

Ironically there is a Chechen mosque in Abu Ghosh an Arab-Israeli town outside of Jerusalem which is named for Kadyrov (because of Chechnya’s monetary contribution). I was there on March 23, 2014 when Kadyrov traveled from Jordan to dedicate “his” mosque. I wrote about it here: “The Israeli Chechen Mosque a Holy Place of Tolerance? https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-chechen-mosque-a-holy-place-of-tolerance/ I highlighted what caught my eye:

A most curious welcoming sign greeted one, which hung outside the walls of the mosque:

“We are against Terror. We are for Peace”

It was as if, to teach us that Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov was more interested in improving his image by delinking the Boston Marathon Attack carried out by two ethnic Chechen/Avar brothers, the Tsarnaevs, and his country. The Chechen jihadi has become a “brand” unto its own in terrorism.

We now know that Putin’s Chechen hit squad for President Zelensky has apparently been eliminated by the Ukrainians. https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-says-it-killed-chechen-forces-sent-to-assassinate-zelensky/While this will not put much of a dent in the notorious Chechen terrorist “brand,” what it does show is that the Ukrainians understand the ramifications of Putin’s maternal drama. Indeed, the Ukrainians have said – let the Russian mothers come to pick up their sons who are POWs because “You will be received and taken to Kyiv where your son will be returned to you,” the ministry statement says. “Unlike Putin’s fascists, we Ukrainians are not waging war against mothers and their captured children.” Thus, the Ukrainians know that people are people with needs not merely objects.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ukraine-says-it-will-free-russian-pows-if-their-mothers-come-to-collect-them/

*The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi is a free download at www.freepsychotherapybooks.org