A former officer with President Putin’s elite security unit has defected and labeled the Russian leader a paranoid “war criminal” who has lost his grip on reality.
“I consider this man a war criminal,” Karakulov said about Putin. “It’s time to end this war and it’s time to stop being silent,” he added, before explaining that he was sharing his story in the hope that other Russians would speak out, too.
He said that he feared that if he quit his job he would be conscripted to fight in Ukraine, so instead he slipped away on the last day of a work trip in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. He added that his wife and daughter had joined him and they flew to Turkey together with just three suitcases. Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and former Putin speechwriter, said that although Karakulov’s account could be damaging for Putin, the Kremlin would likely try to ignore it or downplay it as much as possible.
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