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Vladimir Putin gestures during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Moscow.

Sputnik/Sergey Guneev/Pool via REUTERS

Putin, Ukraine, and the Rat Story

The way Vladimir Putin tells it, one of his great teachers in life was a rat.

As a boy in Leningrad, he once chased a particularly fat one down the hallway of his apartment building. Cornered, the squealing creature turned on young Putin and tried to bite him. Terrified, the boy fled into his parents’ apartment, slamming the door in the rat’s face.

The lesson, Putin recalls, was clear: never put someone’s back against the wall — because you don’t know what they’ll do when desperate. Six days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there are two ways this rat from the 1950s can help us understand what’s going on in Eastern Europe today.

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