Over time Putin has consolidated power in Russia. Recent events show that he is progressively falling in what can be described as a dictator trap. This expertly perspective is reported in an article in Democracy Digest. Here is an excerpt:

Vladimir Putin personifies despotism’s dilemma, Princeton historian and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick this week. ‘The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.’

To put it another way, he’s fallen into the dictator trap, argues Brian Klaas, the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. The risks of miscalculation are compounded, psychology research has shown, by the fact that power literally goes to your head, he writes for The Atlantic. The longer someone is in power, the more they begin to get a sense of  ‘illusory control,’ a mistaken belief that they can control outcomes more than they can.

Read the full article here.