Vladimir Putin is the President of Russia. John Kiriakou’s treatment of Putin runs consistently against the Washington narrative: a rational, competent leader whose overtures to the West were rebuffed, not a madman bent on empire.
The NATO overtures
Kiriakou recounts that when Putin first became president, at the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, he floated the idea of Russia joining NATO.[1] Years later, at a summit with Barack Obama, Putin raised it again: “I spoke with Clinton years ago about Russia joining NATO. It’s something that we would like to explore.” Obama said no — and Putin answered that the Americans had lied to him about other countries joining NATO before.[2][3] Kiriakou pairs this with Putin’s standing complaint about NATO’s eastward march: told that the non-expansion pledge had been made to the Soviet Union, which no longer existed, Putin’s reply was — then there is no more Soviet Union, so can I join?[4]
Why refuse a Russia asking to be friends? Kiriakou’s answer is cynical by his own admission: the policy is really determined by defense contractors — the United States lives in a permanent wartime economy.[5]
Against the madman narrative
Kiriakou has never believed Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine or Eastern Europe.[1] He dismisses portrayals of Putin issuing nonsensical orders and pacing hysterically: the meetings Putin runs are “very competent and very on point.”[6] He likewise rejects the reflex of reducing Putin to “nothing more than a menace.”[7] And he points out the historical whiplash: Putin is the anti-communist that the U.S. government itself backed in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years.[8]
On the 2023 Prigozhin mutiny, Kiriakou mocked the New York Times’ banner analysis of how Putin was “almost overthrown” — a split in the Russian military is a loss, he notes, not a victory.[9]
Putin and Trump
Kiriakou notes Putin said he preferred Trump to Biden because Trump was so unpredictable — you never knew when he would propose something genuinely great.[10] That unpredictability cuts both ways: Kiriakou has described Trump expecting Putin to come to the table on Ukraine, and Putin declining.[11]
Odds and ends
Kiriakou recounts that Ray McGovern traveled to the Kremlin with Oliver Stone, and Putin said: “Oh yeah, let me meet with Oliver and Ray.”[12] He also tells the story of the journalist barred from Russia for reporting on the 1999 apartment-building bombings — in Kiriakou’s telling, one of only two people in the Western world reporting that story, the other being FSB insider Alexander Litvinenko, later poisoned in Britain.[13] And he cites Putin’s needling question about American jihadi-backing in Chechnya: “You guys were backing these jihadis — why were you doing that when you’re supposed to be fighting this war on terror?"[14]
"No foreign leader is crazy”
Asked in 2026 whether Putin might simply be a decent Christian leader, Kiriakou said he genuinely struggles with the question, and answered it partly through a rule he learned at the agency.[15]
The rule is an analytic filter: “anytime somebody in our government or the media describes a foreign leader as crazy, don’t pay attention to them anymore, because they’re not serious analysts. No foreign leader is crazy. Some are violent or brutal, or we don’t like them or their politics or their policy — but they’re not crazy.”[16]
He illustrates it from his own standard briefing on Saddam Hussein thirty-five years earlier. Asked whether Saddam was crazy, his answer was “Absolutely not, he’s not crazy. He runs Iraq like a mafia boss runs his family.”[17]
Applied to Putin: “Putin’s not crazy. He’s not evil. He’s not satanic. All that bad stuff is just hyperbole on the part of, you know, the likes of Lindsey Graham.” But he declines the opposite exaggeration just as firmly — Putin “is largely misunderstood, but you know, he’s not the Dalai Lama.”[17][18]
He balances the ledger explicitly: Putin was a KGB colonel, and also a politician who was mayor of St Petersburg and has won large majorities; he has “done some things that I’ve objected to our own country doing”; and he is a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, which Kiriakou, a devout Greek Orthodox Christian, says he respects. His overall caution: “we shouldn’t go through life with rose-colored glasses,” and “I can tell you definitively we are not getting the whole truth about Vladimir Putin here.”[19][16]
The two dinners he missed
Kiriakou notes he was twice invited to RT anniversary dinners in Moscow that Putin attended, and missed both. He wanted to attend the first specifically because Putin would be there, but the judge overseeing his probation refused to release his passport — “No, you’re not going to Russia to meet Putin.” The second clashed with a film commitment in Mexico.[20][21]
Why Washington never liked him
Kiriakou’s account of the animus is comparative rather than ideological. The United States never liked Putin because he is independent: not mouldable the way Boris Yeltsin was, and not a friendly the way Mikhail Gorbachev was. For a long time the working assumption in Washington was that he would simply have to be lived with. The war, in Kiriakou’s April 2022 reading, was seen as the opportunity not to — with the Ukrainians doing the dirty work.[22][23]
Stiff-arming the bully pulpit
Put to him that Trump had been trying to shame Russia over strikes on Kyiv and Odessa, Kiriakou agreed with the premise and rejected the method: “you can’t shame Russia. They can’t be shamed for this.” He credits Trump with knowing it — “he’s already been president for four and a half years, so I think he understands the Russian mindset. I think he understands Vladimir Putin.”[24][25]
What he thinks Trump misjudged was leverage: “the president really believed that he could use the bully pulpit to push the two sides together, and he’s been stiff armed by Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t appreciate being stiff armed.” Allowing Ukrainian offensive operations to proceed is, on this reading, “one way in which the Trump administration can try to nudge the Russians to the negotiating table.”[26]
He offers a precedent for fighting intensifying alongside talks: during the Paris peace talks in the Vietnam War “that’s when some of the fiercest fighting took place — because both sides wanted to get a leg up that they could then negotiate away in Paris.” He would not be surprised if Moscow and Kyiv had reached the same conclusion about Istanbul.[27]