Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones.
In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the “surprised and frightened” Putin to his door before he slammed it shut in the rodent’s face. For Putin, it’s a parable: “I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.”
More than two decades later, that anecdotal seed has sprouted into a ubiquitous narrative that has helped shape the West’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. A cornered Putin, commentators and policy makers in the United States and Europe have frequently insisted, could behave like the rat, lashing out even with weapons of mass destruction if provoked. The assumption has informed policies on arms provisions to Ukraine and nuclear deterrence against Russia.
Yet the Russian leader’s response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June has called the cornered-rat concept into question. Some experts argue that Russian propaganda amplified the metaphor, and that Putin’s reaction to the rebellion exposed it as a lie. Others paint a more complicated picture, suggesting that the story does reveal deep truths about Putin, but not the ones we imagined.
To better understand the Russian leader’s psychology—and make sounder policy decisions as a result—it’s worth tracing how an obscure vignette from Putin’s childhood took on such a prominent life of its own.
Putin has retold the rat story, and the lesson he learned about the perils of cornering others, several times in the 23 years since he first dropped the biographical breadcrumb, including in a 2005 60 Minutes interview. I’ve come across at least one instance of a former Kremlin official explicitly comparing Putin and Russia to the cornered rat. And Putin, along with other Russian officials and their allies, has occasionally implicitly echoed the anecdote’s themes via warnings to the West to not back Russia into a corner.
But the story was barely mentioned in the Western media (with some exceptions, including a fleeting reference in this magazine) until Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, when references gradually ticked up. As Putin suffered setbacks in Ukraine, Russia experts and journalists writing about the conflict and searching for insight into the Russian leader’s mindset started citing the anecdote from the 2000 interview collection. And they did something curious: They identified Putin not with his younger self but with the cornered rat, suggesting that his precarious position made him liable to lash out against his adversaries.
Only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, did the notion of Putin as a “rat in a corner” achieve escape velocity, to the point that it now seems to be invoked much more frequently in Western countries than in Russia.
The rat story served as the framing device for a flurry of articles in the early days and months of the war, both serious-minded (with headlines such as “A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever”) and more sensationalist (“A rat with nuclear weapons … That’s why we mustn’t drive Vladimir Putin so far into a corner he will do anything to save his own skin”). A May 2022 CNN documentary promising to take viewers “inside the mind” of the Russian leader seized on the rat story as a leitmotif of his biography, noting that Putin grew up in the “darkest corners” of St. Petersburg and that being “trapped in a corner only to fight his way out” has been “a theme throughout Vladimir Putin’s life,” building to the big question: “Erratic, obsessed, enraged. Is Putin now that cornered rat he once encountered?”
References to the tale tend to crop up when Putin is either issuing nuclear threats or under intense economic or military pressure, and they have become so common that experts often describe Putin as a “cornered rat” or even “a snarling rat backed into a corner,” with nary a mention of the childhood story that spawned the metaphor. Perhaps most consequentially, the language has made its way into the vernacular of U.S. and European governments—popping up in NATO research and remarks by British lawmakers. In his new biography of Putin, the journalist Philip Short refers to a conclusion by CIA analysts that Putin’s rat story should be “read as a warning that, if Putin were ever cornered, he would turn and fight.”
In the jittery days following Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, as the United States slapped sweeping sanctions on Moscow, one anonymous official quoted by The New York Times gave a name to the ambient concern in the White House, voiced repeatedly in Situation Room meetings, about a trapped Russian leader lashing out: the “Cornered Putin Problem.” Last fall, when the Biden administration was resisting Ukrainian requests for more sophisticated weapons amid advances against Russian forces, Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, expressed concern that “Ukraine’s success on the battlefield could cause Russia to feel backed into a corner, and that is something we must remain mindful of.” Cornered-rat logic arguably has also informed calls to negotiate a face-saving way for Putin to get out of his quagmire.
Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me she’s seen the concern about pushing Putin and Russia into a corner most “profoundly” among U.S. and Western European officials, whereas officials in Eastern European countries and in Ukraine itself, given their experience with Soviet occupation, tend to believe the best way to deter Russia is through “force and strength.”
“I don’t know if senior policy makers, as they look at this situation, call to mind that [cornered rat] metaphor, but anyone who says, ‘We can’t take certain steps in Ukraine, because Putin might go nuclear’ is manifesting the logic of that paradigm, which is precisely the policy impact that Putin has been seeking,” John Herbst, the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work), told me.
Some leading experts on Putin and Russia have argued compellingly that the cornered-rat metaphor has real merit in illuminating how the Russian leader might act. Shortly after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, the journalist Masha Gessen wrote that the rat story “keeps coming up in my conversations in Moscow” and that “no one who has ever heard it doubts that the adult Putin identifies with the rat.”
Around the same time, the Cold War historian Vladislav Zubok told me he was alarmed by those in the West who “keep shouting, ‘Press this guy Putin against the wall. Squash him like a rat! Kill him!’ And this guy has a nuclear button. Come on! Don’t make him nervous.” Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian politics at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote to me that, in his opinion, the cornered-rat image “is very accurate.” He noted that Putin “responds to every challenge (e.g. damage to the Crimean bridge) with a brutal attack (e.g. missile strikes).”
But other experts—such as Polyakova, who studies disinformation, and Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine—argue that Putin and the Kremlin have intentionally spread the image of Putin as a cornered rat as a form of propaganda, a verminous spin on Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory.” They hypothesize that Putin, as a former KGB agent during the Cold War, would have been well versed in psychological operations and thus likely had a calculated reason to repeatedly relay the rat story and the lesson he drew from it.
Whether or not Putin had an ulterior motive in sharing the rat story, Herbst told me, the Russian leader and “his henchmen” have emphasized the trope over the years “to instill fear in Western policy makers and also in policy makers in smaller, closer-by countries” that if they oppose Putin getting what he wants, he will strike back in devastating ways. Putin doesn’t have to repeat the story often, Herbst said, because the West has done the work for him by amplifying its theme.
As striking as the story’s repetition is the frequency with which it has failed to predict Putin’s behavior. Faced with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June rebellion—as mercenaries marched toward Moscow—Putin’s reaction was not to lunge forward but rather to back away, negotiate with the Wagner Group leader, and make concessions to the mutineers to defuse the crisis.
Polyakova considers Putin’s behavior during the episode consistent with a broader pattern that even predates the current conflict: “In every instance where we [in the West] have pushed back against either Russian aggression or Russia’s economic interests, there hasn’t been this ‘all hell breaks loose’ response.”
Herbst agrees. He points out that Western countries have repeatedly crossed ostensible Russian red lines—by providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, for example, or admitting Finland and Sweden into NATO—without Putin resorting to nuclear use or other major escalations. And yet, the notion persists, perhaps usefully to Putin, that he must not be forced on the ropes or he will unleash World War III.
Natalia Gevorkyan was one of three Russian journalists who spoke with Putin for the 2000 autobiographical interviews. She told me she doubts that the Russian leader deliberately planted the rat story as propaganda—at least in its initial telling. Putin didn’t know in advance the questions the journalists would be asking, and he volunteered the anecdote only when they pressed him on whether the conditions at the communal apartment where he grew up were as horrible as a former teacher of his had suggested.
The Kremlin had encouraged Putin to “talk openly” about himself so that the interviews would introduce him to Russians who “didn’t know anything about him” at the time, Gevorkyan said. Stories like the one about the rats seemed intended to fulfill that directive.
“Nobody was cornering him” back in 2000, Gevorkyan reasoned. “I don’t believe that he was that smart to say, ‘Look, guys, listen to this story and never push me into the corner.’” She conceded that it’s “quite possible” he has sent a political message by repeating the story and its lesson in the ensuing years.
But Gevorkyan, who is now based in Paris, did challenge the conventional interpretation of the story. She wonders why so many people (herself included, until she looked at the tale in a new light after Russia’s assault against Ukraine last year) gravitate toward a convoluted reading of it that associates Putin with the dangerous rodent. The more straightforward moral of the story is that a frightened young Vladimir backed off when threatened, and that the elder Vladimir might do the same under similar circumstances. Something about the tale, she mused, tempts people to concentrate on the pouncing rat rather than the fleeing boy.
Putin had a stick that he could have used to protect himself against the much smaller animal. Instead, Gevorkyan said, “he runs away and he hides in his own apartment and he feels safe. For me, this is much more a story about Putin than about the rat.”
No one but Putin himself will ever know for sure if, when push comes to shove, he is the cornered rat, the frightened boy, or something else entirely. But policy makers and the public can pay particularly close attention to what Putin does rather than what he says or what others say about him, and build their understanding of the Russian leader on a foundation of empirical evidence. They can avoid the siren song of popular frameworks that offer simplistic explanatory models for a complicated geopolitical actor. They can design policies and strategies to defend their interests that factor in their best assessments of Putin, while not accepting as gospel any single measure of the man and how he might behave.
Aleksandar Matovski, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has studied the connection between Putin’s military adventurism abroad and his political standing at home. He told me that he sees some limited but significant truth in the cornered-rat paradigm: “There is a genuine threshold at which cornered Putin (in the sense of losing his grip domestically) would lash out aggressively, as a fall from power for a personalized dictator like him would be catastrophic,” he wrote to me, noting that his comments constitute his own assessment and not the position of the U.S. Department of Defense. But he also underscored the evidence that has piled up against the paradigm. Putin has “exploited the fear of the ‘cornered rat’ as a sort of bluff, particularly through nuclear blackmail in recent years,” he observed.
To avoid a situation in which a weakened Putin in dire circumstances blunders into nuclear use, Matovski argued, Western officials will need “to appeal to the survivalist outlook of Putin and his elite by signaling determination to retaliate in ways that will deny the Kremlin the benefits of a nuclear strike” and exert painful pressure on the Putin regime.
In other words, to manage the risk of nuclear escalation with Russia, they shouldn’t dismiss offhand the man who once saw in a cornered rat a warning about the dangers of desperation. But they should nevertheless appeal to the survival instincts of the boy with the stick who, when faced with those dangers, decided to run for it.