Vladimir Putin likes to be called a "strong man" or a tough guy but he is far from that. He completely lacks courage. Courage requires risk, conscience and the willingness to accept personal consequences. Ordering young men to bomb civilians from the safety of a gilded palace requires none of these. It demands no bravery — only the moral vacancy to treat human lives as disposable pieces on a geopolitical chessboard.
Putin bears no personal danger when he orders missile strikes on apartment blocks or hospitals or evacuation routes. He will never see the terror of a family huddled in a basement or the rubble left where a school once stood. Instead, he sits insulated by layers of security, propaganda and obedient generals. The risk, the fear, the blood — those belong to others. Courage is impossible when the costs are shifted entirely onto the bodies of the young and the innocent.
What Putin displays is not toughness but the cold ease of a psychopath who long ago stopped valuing any human life but his own. When violence comes with no accountability, when dissenters and the media are silenced, and when cruelty becomes routine policy, ordering atrocities becomes effortless. That's the nature of authoritarian power: It makes evil simple.
No, there's nothing strong or courageous about sending others to do what you would never dare face yourself. It takes no courage to bomb civilians. It takes only the kind of evil that thrives behind closed doors and expects others to pay its price.
I know this isn't a local issue, but if you have thoughts on Putin or his war in Ukraine, please share them.
I'm Bill Lamb, and that's my Point of View.
