In August 2013, Vladimir Putin emerged from a funeral in St. Petersburg. His judo coach, Anatoly Rakhlin, the man who had trained him since he was eleven years old, was dead at seventy-five. Putin had called him "a second father."

State television captured what happened next. Putin laid flowers at the grave, stood with his head bowed beside the coffin, and then walked outside. His official limousine was waiting. He waved it away.

He told his security detail he wanted to walk.

And then the president of Russia, the man who sits six meters from visiting heads of state, who orders Novichok poisonings and launches invasions, walked alone down an empty street toward the River Neva. His bodyguards trailed at a distance. He didn't look back.

That image, one of the most powerful men alive choosing to be unprotected, raises the question that every analyst, intelligence officer, and foreign leader has tried to answer for twenty-five years: What psychological architecture produces both the man who walks alone in grief and the man who cannot tolerate anyone else's autonomy?

TL;DR: Why Vladimir Putin is an Enneagram Type 8
  • The paradox: A man who has built the most elaborate apparatus of personal control since Stalin voluntarily shed his protection to grieve a judo coach. The same leader who orders assassinations invited his elementary school teacher to his presidential inauguration.
  • The non-obvious insight: Putin is a replacement child — born after two brothers died. Research on replacement children says they "do not feel like they genuinely exist." His entire apparatus of power may not just be about control. It may be about proving he's real.
  • The pattern: Every major move, from the apartment bombings to Crimea to the Ukraine invasion, follows the same logic: corner others before they corner you. He learned it from a rat in a Leningrad hallway when he was ten.

What is Vladimir Putin's Personality Type?

Vladimir Putin is an Enneagram Type 8

Enneagram Type 8s are driven by a core need to never be at anyone's mercy. They don't just want strength. They need it the way other people need oxygen. Vulnerability isn't uncomfortable for an 8. It's existentially threatening.

Academic psychological profiles using the Millon Inventory found Putin's primary personality patterns to be Dominant/controlling, Ambitious/self-serving, and Conscientious/dutiful, with secondary Retiring/reserved and Dauntless/adventurous tendencies. Translation: he needs to dominate, believes he deserves to, and will take risks to make it happen. But he keeps his cards close.

A 2023 follow-up study by Aubrey Immelman presented at the International Society of Political Psychology found something darker. Putin's profile had shifted. The dominant pattern moved from "controlling" to "aggressive (sadistically hostile)." The ambitious pattern moved from "self-serving" to "exploitative (pathologically narcissistic)." A new feature appeared: "Distrusting/suspicious."

The man hadn't just hardened. He had deteriorated, measurably, in the way psychologists can track.

But calling Putin a Type 8 isn't the insight. That's obvious. The insight is why — what specific wound created this particular architecture of control, and why the armor has been getting thicker for decades rather than thinner.

The answer starts in a communal apartment with rats in the walls.

The Miracle Child

Leningrad, 1952

The Leningrad of Putin's childhood was not romantic.

Born in 1952, young Vladimir lived with his parents in a communal apartment shared with two other families. No hot water. No bathtub. The toilet was broken. Heat was scarce. And rats ran through the building.

What made this childhood different from mere Soviet poverty was what had come before.

Putin's father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, was severely wounded fighting the Nazis and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. His mother, Maria Shelomova, nearly died during the Siege of Leningrad.

There are two versions of that story, and the gap between them is psychologically revealing.

Putin's own published account: "Once my mother fainted from hunger and people thought she had died, laying her out with the corpses. Luckily Mama woke up in time and started moaning."

The version Putin told Hillary Clinton privately: His father came home from the front for a short break. Approaching their apartment, he saw a pile of bodies stacked in the street and men loading them onto a truck. He drew nearer and recognized his wife's shoes on one of the bodies. He ran up and demanded her body. She was still alive.

In the private telling, his father is the hero who saves his mother. In the public version, his mother saves herself. Even when recounting his parents' most traumatic moment, Putin controls the narrative. He tells different versions to different audiences. The instinct to manage information — to never let anyone hold a story you don't control — didn't start with the KGB. It started at the kitchen table.

The Brothers Who Died

Two older brothers died before Vladimir was born. Albert died in infancy. Viktor was born in 1940 and died of diphtheria and starvation during the Siege. He was sent to a children's shelter while Maria searched for food. He died there. The family didn't know where he was buried for years. Researchers later found that Viktor Vladimirovich Putin was buried at Piskarevskoye Cemetery — in mass graves with 500,000 others.

Vladimir was the third son. The replacement.

This matters more than any biographer has acknowledged. Psychologists studying replacement children — children born after the death of a sibling — have found a consistent pattern. "The replacement child does not have a sense of self. Often the child does not feel like he genuinely exists." The mother unconsciously transfers the deceased child's image onto the new child, depositing "traumatized self and traumatized object images into the replacement child's self-representation."

A child who does not feel like he genuinely exists, growing into a man who needs to dominate his entire environment, is not coincidence. It is compensation. The Type 8's core fear — being harmed, being controlled, being rendered powerless — maps directly onto the replacement child's existential anxiety. Putin's need for control may not be just about power. It may be about proving he is real.

The Rat

Putin has spoken about chasing rats through those hallways. One day, he cornered a large one. It turned on him, lunging at his face.

He learned two things. First: even the weakest creature will fight viciously when cornered. Second, and more important: "No one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out."

That second lesson is the one analysts miss. It isn't just autobiography. It's doctrine. Putin extracted a universal principle from a childhood trauma: creating cornered creatures is a strategic error. He has repeated it to foreign leaders and journalists for decades — sometimes as wisdom, sometimes as warning. If you corner me, I will lash out. This is not a choice. It is physics.

"I was a hooligan, not a pioneer."

He was small and frequently bullied. At age 11, he began training in judo under Anatoly Rakhlin — the coach whose funeral would, fifty years later, be the one time he walked unprotected through a city he controlled entirely.

His teacher Vera Gurevich saw something in the young hooligan. She approached his father directly and asked him to intervene. Putin was a terrible student who hadn't been allowed into the Communist Young Pioneers, a serious social stigma. Gurevich became a surrogate mother figure — the boy would babysit her daughters, sometimes staying overnight at her home.

She is the primary reason, along with Rakhlin, that Putin ended up on a path to power rather than becoming, in one biographer's words, "a convict or a lost soul." She has been invited to several of his presidential inaugurations.

There's one more detail from this period. Putin's mother, Maria, secretly baptized him in the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant — without the knowledge of his atheist father. A covert act of defiance and protection. In the early 1990s, she gave Putin his baptismal cross and asked him to have it blessed at the Holy Sepulchre during a trip to Israel. He did.

In 1996, a fire destroyed Putin's dacha. The aluminum cross was one of the few items to survive. A fireman found it in the ashes.

"It must have been the Lord's will," Putin said.

The boy who didn't feel real, carrying his mother's secret protection. A cross that survived fire. The psychology is almost too neat. But it happened.

The Cornered Rat Doctrine

The KGB Years

At 15, Putin walked into the local KGB headquarters and asked how to join.

They told him to go to law school. So he did.

In 1975, he joined the KGB, trained at the 401st KGB School in Leningrad, and was eventually assigned to Dresden, East Germany. His work was mostly administrative, but Dresden is where Putin experienced the moment that would haunt him for decades.

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, crowds approached the KGB building. Putin went outside to face them alone. He told them to leave. That this was Soviet territory and armed guards were ready to fire.

The crowd dispersed. But inside, Putin and his colleagues were burning documents frantically. "We burned so much paper that the oven broke," he later recalled.

He watched an empire collapse. And he drew the lesson a Type 8 would draw: the empire fell because it lost control. Not because the ideology failed. Not because the economy collapsed. Because the people at the top stopped being willing to use force.

"There is no such thing as a former KGB man."

Blood, Bombs, and the Outhouse

In August 1999, Putin was an obscure bureaucrat. By December, he was acting president of Russia.

On August 9, Boris Yeltsin named Putin prime minister. The fourth that year. Putin's approval rating: 2 percent.

Then the bombs started.

In September 1999, a series of explosions destroyed apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities while people slept. More than 300 died. Nearly 1,500 were injured.

Putin blamed Chechen terrorists and ordered a massive military campaign. On September 24, he delivered the line that would define his public persona:

"We will pursue them everywhere. Excuse me for saying so: We'll catch them in the toilet. We'll wipe them out in the outhouse."

The crude, decisive language electrified Russia. From 2% approval in August to 55% by December. On New Year's Eve, Yeltsin resigned. Putin became acting president.

But something troubling had occurred on September 22. In Ryazan, residents spotted two men carrying sacks into an apartment building's basement. Police found what bomb-disposal experts identified as military-grade explosives with a timer set for 5:30 a.m.

The next day, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev announced the "bomb" was actually part of a training exercise. The bags contained sugar.

To this day, no credible evidence has linked Chechen terrorists to the apartment bombings. Historian Yuri Felshtinsky: "Had there been no terrorist attacks and no second war in Chechnya, Putin would have had no chance of becoming the president of Russia."

The cornered rat doctrine in action: if you need an enemy to justify seizing control, create one.

The Judo Operating System

At the 2015 Valdai Summit in Sochi, Putin was asked about Russia's airstrike campaign in Syria. His answer:

"Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me a rule: if a fight is inevitable, you have to throw the first punch."

He wasn't being metaphorical. His teacher Vera Gurevich recalled that when a 14-year-old Putin broke a classmate's leg, he explained: "Some only understand force."

Putin was awarded an 8th dan black belt in judo in 2012, the first Russian to achieve this status. The International Judo Federation stripped him of this honor following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Judo's core principle: using your opponent's force against them. You don't overpower. You redirect. You control through technique, timing, and leverage. Barnard College professor Kimberly Marten described Putin's approach: "He sizes up an opponent's weakness, throws him off balance, and then makes his opponent fall from his own weight."

This isn't metaphor. It's operational doctrine. When Ukrainian protests destabilized the government in 2014, Putin saw the imbalance and took Crimea — using "the weakness and indecisiveness of his opponent." When the West imposed sanctions, Putin turned the pressure inward to consolidate domestic control, using the opponent's economic force to build the isolationist fence he wanted anyway.

Even his framing of Crimea followed judo logic. He declared the West was trying to "drive Russia into a corner" — invoking his own rat story to frame aggression as defensive response. Using the opponent's moral momentum against them.

The Khodorkovsky Lesson

To understand what the cornered rat doctrine looks like at scale, you have to understand what happened to Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In 2003, Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia. Worth an estimated $15 billion, ranked 16th on the Forbes billionaire list. His oil company Yukos was about to become the fourth-largest in the world. He funded opposition parties. He publicly criticized Kremlin corruption.

No one had ever reached that point before. Not under the tsars. Not under Yeltsin.

On October 25, 2003, masked agents stormed Khodorkovsky's private jet at a Siberian airport and arrested him.

The charges were fraud and tax evasion. Crimes every oligarch had committed during the chaotic 1990s. But only Khodorkovsky went to prison. He would spend ten years there.

Leonid Bershidsky, founder of the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti: "Any of the oligarchs could have faced similar charges; Khodorkovsky's imprisonment made them so docile that Putin confined himself to making an example of just one victim."

Yukos was dismantled. Its assets absorbed by state-controlled Rosneft.

One judo throw. Every oligarch fell from his own weight.

"He's Afraid of His Own Weakness"

In 2007, Angela Merkel visited Putin at his residence in Sochi. Putin knew Merkel was afraid of dogs — she'd been bitten by one years earlier. He brought his black Labrador, Konni, into the meeting room. The dog padded toward Merkel. She tensed. Putin watched.

Photographs from the meeting show Merkel sitting rigid while Putin leans back, relaxed, the dog between them. The power dynamic captured in a single frame.

Merkel told reporters afterward: "I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weakness."

In twelve words, the German chancellor identified the core architecture of Putin's Type 8 psychology. The need to dominate doesn't come from strength. It comes from terror of weakness. The armor isn't hiding the wound. The armor is the wound. Every display of power is simultaneously a confession of what he cannot bear.

The Controlled Fury

Type 8s sit in the gut center of the Enneagram, which means their core emotion is anger. Not the explosive, visible kind. The kind that runs constant and deep, like an underground river. Putin's anger is the most controlled version of this: compressed, calculated, deployed with precision.

When Larry King asked what happened to the submarine Kursk, where 118 sailors died, Putin answered with two words: "It sank."

The brutality of that response isn't emotional absence. It's anger so tightly compressed it becomes a blade. Feel what it would take to say those two words — to watch a journalist ask about 118 dead men and decide that the correct response is to give him nothing. No grief. No explanation. Just the fact, delivered like a slap.

The outhouse speech was anger in a different register — crude, volcanic, populist. But the function was the same: to establish that this man's fury has no ceiling, and you do not want to be the one who discovers where it ends.

Body language experts analyzing thousands of hours of Putin footage note remarkable emotional restraint. When he does display emotion, it's usually calculated: a flash of anger to intimidate, a brief smile to disarm. But under pressure, he "shows much more aggression in his facial expressions, frequently baring his lower teeth, a clear anger/threat display."

The armor has cracks.

The Dark Wit

One thing the psychopathy theories miss: Putin is actually funny. In a dark, unsettling way.

His humor is spontaneous, not scripted. Academics studying his public appearances note that unlike most modern political communication, Putin's jokes reveal genuine aspects of his worldview.

  • When a journalist mentioned another candidate wanted to run for president, Putin asked: "Of what country?"
  • When asked if his aides had relayed jokes made about him: "No, they are afraid to tell me."
  • At a 2018 meeting with John Bolton, he gestured to the U.S. seal and asked: "Has your eagle picked all the olives and only has arrows left?"
  • At a Moscow conference, he cupped his hand around the microphone and stage-whispered: "I'll tell you a secret: yes, we'll definitely [interfere in the 2020 election]. Just don't tell anyone."

The humor serves multiple purposes. It humanizes him to supporters. It dominates the room by forcing others to react. It reveals a mind that finds amusement in power dynamics.

But it only flows one direction. Joking about Putin in Russia can land you in prison. He can dish it out. He doesn't take it.

The Tears He Blamed on Wind

In March 2012, after winning the presidential election, Putin stood before a massive rally in Moscow with tears streaming down his face. Visible, undeniable tears.

His explanation: "Well, it was real, but because of the wind."

Analysts who studied the footage noted "his voice was cracking up and the pauses before several words betray the feelings of a man who is under severe strain." The recent street protests had terrified him. The tears were real. The explanation was a cornered rat's instinct: never admit you felt something. Reframe. Redirect. Control the narrative.

For a Type 8, being seen crying is worse than being seen bleeding.

The Retreat into Five

Here is where the Enneagram stops being a label and starts being a predictive tool.

Under stress, Type 8s don't become more aggressive. They move toward unhealthy Type 5 behavior: withdrawing, hoarding information, retreating into isolation, cutting off from people, constructing elaborate mental models disconnected from reality.

Putin's trajectory since 2020 is a textbook case.

The Bunker

During COVID, Putin "withdrew into himself, became distanced from the bureaucratic machinery, and spent a lot of time alone stewing in his own fears and thoughts." He sequestered himself with strict regulations limiting visitors. His inner circle was "asked to present faecal samples several times a week to check for infection and, in some cases, asked to isolate for two weeks before face-to-face meetings."

A defected Russian protection officer, Gleb Karakulov, said Putin "sits in a bunker because of a fear of assassination and refuses to use the internet or mobile phones."

A neuropsychologist who studied the case argued the "progressive isolation" could have led to hubris syndrome — "diminished his ability to weigh up risk."

The Table

In February 2022, images of French President Macron sitting across an enormous white table from Putin went viral. Six meters apart. So distant they looked like they were in different rooms. The table became a meme.

It was also a clinical symptom. The physical manifestation of Type 5 withdrawal. The man who cornered rats as a child now sits behind a six-meter barrier of white lacquer, cornering himself.

The Shrinking Circle

Ten years ago, Putin's circle of trust included several dozen people. Today, experts estimate it's down to three or four. His press secretary says Putin demands professionalism, efficiency, and loyalty, but Russian analysts observe that "loyalty has always been more important than competency."

Those who remain closest share one quality: decades of proven loyalty. Not competence. Not strategic value. Loyalty. The Type 5 in disintegration hoards the few people it still trusts and cuts off everyone else.

The Invasion Decision

Multiple analysts believe Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine in isolation, without adequate counsel, precisely because his retreat into Five had cut him off from reality-testing. Condoleezza Rice described him as having "an ever deepening, delusional rendering of history."

Former DIA analyst Rebekah Koffler disagreed: "Putin is absolutely not crazy. He's a cold-blooded, typical Russian autocratic leader and a very calculated risk-taker. He's simply executing a plan he has been hatching for 20 years."

Both views miss something the Enneagram clarifies. Putin's worldview can be internally coherent while his information inputs have narrowed to almost nothing. He's calculating rationally within a model that no longer maps to reality — because he systematically removed everyone who might update it. That's not madness. It's Type 5 disintegration: the retreat into a mental fortress that no data from the outside can penetrate.

Fiona Hill, former NSC senior director and co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, identified six overlapping personas that constitute Putin's psychological architecture: the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the Case Officer. What's striking about this framework isn't the personas themselves. It's that by 2022, only three — the Statist, the History Man, and the Survivalist — appeared to be operational. The rest had been consumed by the retreat.

The Private Life Putin Guards Like State Secrets

Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva in 1983. For 30 years, she appeared beside him at official functions, often looking uncomfortable. In June 2013, the couple announced their divorce during the intermission of a ballet performance. She's given no interviews about her decades with Putin. Whatever she knows, she'll never say.

His two acknowledged daughters, Maria and Katerina, attended university under false identities. For years, Putin refused to discuss them publicly. In 2024, both appeared as speakers at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — seen as a shift in his approach to dynasty-building.

And then there's Alina Kabaeva, the Olympic gymnastics champion, 30 years Putin's junior. The Kremlin denies any relationship. According to a 2024 investigation, Putin and Kabaeva have two sons: Ivan (born 2015) and Vladimir Jr. (born 2019). The boys reportedly live at Valdai Palace, kept entirely out of public view. Kabaeva allegedly watches her sons play hockey with their father from behind an opaque glass screen.

There may be a third hidden child, Elizaveta, reportedly born to a former associate named Svetlana Krivonogikh in the late 1990s. Krivonogikh is now a multimillionaire.

The pattern: potentially seven children, mostly hidden, living in heavily protected isolation. Family is vulnerability. Better to hide them than risk them becoming leverage.

"I am the wealthiest man, not just in Europe, but in the whole world. I collect emotions."

That quote may be the closest Putin has come to admitting he feels anything at all. And even then — I collect emotions. Not "I feel." I collect. As if feelings are intelligence to be gathered and filed, not experienced.

The Rare Cracks Toward Warmth

When Type 8s are healthy, they move toward Type 2 — becoming more open-hearted, caring, willing to show warmth without needing to control the outcome. In Putin, these moments are extraordinarily rare. But they exist.

The Rakhlin funeral walk is the clearest. A man who equates isolation with safety voluntarily shedding his protection to grieve. Not performing grief for cameras. Walking away from cameras.

Vera Gurevich at his inaugurations — decades of sustained gratitude toward the teacher who saw something in a hooligan. This isn't transactional. There's no strategic value in inviting a retired schoolteacher to the Kremlin. It's genuine attachment, expressed the only way he knows: by sharing his power with someone who once shared her kindness.

The baptismal cross — his mother's secret protection, carried for decades, blessed as she asked. Allowing himself to be protected rather than always being the protector. The armor letting something through.

When asked what he could never forgive, Putin's answer was immediate: "Betrayal." The intensity reveals the investment. You cannot be betrayed by someone you don't care about.

The Orthodox Turn

The Putin of the 1990s showed little interest in religion. The Putin of the 2020s positions himself as defender of Christian civilization against Western decadence.

The baptismal cross story suggests the roots may be older than analysts assume. His mother's covert faith, hidden from his atheist father, mirrors Putin's own approach to vulnerability: keep the sacred things secret.

At the center of Putin's public transformation stands Patriarch Kirill, who has called Putin's rule "a miracle of God." The relationship is symbiotic.

What Putin gets: Ideological legitimacy. The "Russian World" (Russkiy Mir) doctrine blends Orthodoxy with nationalism, providing theological justification for territorial expansion. Father Cyrill Hovorun, Kirill's former theological advisor: "The church is the main supplier of Putin's ideology."

What Kirill gets: Power, property, and institutional expansion.

Kirill has described the war in Ukraine as a "Holy War." Whether Putin's personal faith is genuine remains unknowable. But the cross survived the fire. And he kept it.

The Navalny Question

No case reveals Putin's psychology more starkly than Alexei Navalny.

Navalny rose to prominence exposing corruption throughout Putin's administration. His YouTube videos detailing palatial estates and offshore accounts showcased Putin's hypocrisy to millions. He was everything Putin's architecture was built to prevent: publicly confrontational, mockingly irreverent, impossible to ignore. Impossible to control.

In August 2020, Russian security services poisoned Navalny with Novichok. He survived only because emergency treatment in Germany saved his life. Then, knowing what awaited him, he chose to return to Russia in January 2021. He was arrested immediately.

The years that followed were a slow execution. Transferred to increasingly brutal facilities. Subjected to isolation, denial of medical care, conditions designed to break him. On February 16, 2024, authorities announced his death at a remote penal colony above the Arctic Circle.

Tens of thousands of Russians attended his funeral despite the risk of arrest. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, vowed to continue his work: "By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me. But I still have the other half left, and it tells me that I have no right to give up."

Navalny's return to Russia — walking voluntarily into the cage — was the one thing Putin's cornered-rat psychology could not compute. The doctrine says: people fight when cornered, flee when they can, and submit when outmatched. Navalny did none of these. He walked back into the trap on purpose, with his eyes open, and smiled for the cameras.

For a man whose entire psychological architecture is built on the assumption that everyone is ultimately motivated by survival, Navalny's choice must have been genuinely incomprehensible. And that incomprehension may explain the escalating brutality of his treatment: not just punishment, but an attempt to force reality back into a framework where it made sense.

In 2024, investigators estimated Russian authorities had prosecuted more than 116,000 activists in six years, exceeding the level of political repression under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin — the first ever for a leader of a UN Security Council permanent member.

The cornered rat is cornering an entire country.

The Dependency Paradox

One relationship defines Putin's geopolitical position today: his partnership with Xi Jinping.

The two leaders have met more than 40 times since 2013. Days before the 2022 invasion, they declared their partnership had "no limits." Both share a worldview opposing U.S. hegemony. Both see Western liberalism as a threat to their domestic control.

Trade between their countries reached an all-time high of $245 billion in 2024. But the partnership is lopsided. China is Russia's number-one trading partner. Russia is only China's seventh-largest. Sanctions have pushed Russia into China's economic orbit with few alternatives.

For a Type 8 whose entire psychology revolves around never being at anyone's mercy, this is the ultimate contradiction. Putin needs China. But needing anyone is the thing he has spent his entire life making impossible.

"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains."

He wants the empire's strength without its vulnerability. He wants the partnership without the dependency. He wants to be the rat who corners others while making sure no wall ever closes behind him.

Understanding Putin

Vladimir Putin is not a mystery if you understand his psychological operating system.

A replacement child who may not have felt like he genuinely existed. A childhood of poverty, rats, and family trauma. A mother's secret baptism. A judo coach who became a second father. A teacher who saw something in a hooligan. An empire he watched collapse because it stopped being willing to use force.

None of this excuses anything.

Understanding how someone thinks is not endorsing what they do. Putin has ordered poisonings, imprisoned opposition leaders, and launched a war that has killed hundreds of thousands. His psychological coherence makes him more dangerous, not less.

The utility of understanding Putin isn't sympathy. It's prediction.

He will resist anything that looks like surrender. He will interpret conciliation as weakness. He will take risks when he perceives opponents as divided. He will retreat further into isolation when reality contradicts his model. He will never, under any circumstances, allow himself to be cornered — and if he is, he will lash out with everything he has, because a rat in a hallway in Leningrad taught him that this is what living things do.

Angela Merkel understood it in twelve words: He's afraid of his own weakness.

The scrawny kid who learned that cornered rats fight viciously is still operating from that lesson. He always will be.

Disclaimer: This analysis of Vladimir Putin's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect his actual personality type.