Vladimir Putin the Reluctant Humanitarian Warlord: Dissected

At about 11 a.m. on Thursday, a Russian jet-powered drone hit a platform at Dnipro railway station as a train prepared to leave for Zaporizhzhia, killing 15 people.

Within hours, strikes had killed two 15-year-old girls in Chernihiv and at least three people in Kremenchuk. That evening, safely ensconced in the Kremlin, for now at least, President Vladimir Putin wrapped up the third Russia-Africa Summit, held under the motto "For Peace, Security and Development." Irony is dead too, it seems; killed by a droning Russian.

Sitting beside African Union chair Evariste Ndayishimiye, Putin talked up grain, scholarships, medicines, and Russian-built nuclear reactors. This was, perhaps, Putin the "humanitarian" as U.S.

envoy Steve Witkoff lavished him recently. But the questions quickly turned to Europe, and the real news: his call with the leaders of Finland and Norway; talk of war by 2030; and a warning that the Baltic could go the way of the Strait of Hormuz. The real news, and the real Putin.

Here was a more familiar Kremlin character: the reluctant humanitarian warlord, forever offering bread, forever dragged into fights by other people. Putin doesn’t want war with Europe, but Russia is ready, and already fighting one. He backs the law of the sea, but will respond to any challenge.

He has never pursued colonial policies, but calls Ukrainian land Russian. In this latest edition of Dissected, Newsweek takes its scalpel to Putin’s press conference. Russia has found other ways to exploit young Africans.

A Kenyan intelligence report presented to lawmakers in February said more than 1,000 Kenyans had been recruited to fight for Russia. Moscow has since agreed to stop, Kenya’s foreign minister says. Ukraine estimates that 1,780 mercenaries from 36 African countries are fighting for Russia.

And in 2024, The Associated Press found about 200 young African women, recruited for what was billed as a work-study program, assembling Iranian-designed attack drones in Tatarstan. True, just not as intended. The right quarter is Moscow’s great friend Beijing.

China’s trade with Africa hit a record $348 billion in 2025. Russia’s, by Putin’s own figure earlier that evening, is $27 billion—less than China does with the continent in an average month. Africa’s not an object of rivalry for Russia because Moscow simply can’t compete.

It’s a middle power with nukes, not a major one. Accept it, Vlad. Two days earlier, the Kremlin’s readout of Putin’s call with Finland and Norway referred to Oleshky, a town in Ukraine’s Kherson region, as "the Russian community of Alyoshki."

Russia proclaimed Kherson annexed in 2022. The U.N.

General Assembly condemned the move by a vote of 143-5. Oleshky had 24,000 residents before the war. The White House says 1,700 to 2,000 remain.

That’s before we even get to Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea…Putin is an imperial czar with Soviet training. Sovereignty, with a "Made in China" sticker. China now supplies 90 percent of Russia’s sanctioned technology imports, up from about 80 percent a year earlier, Bloomberg reported in April.

Of Putin’s three digital superpowers, one appears to be shopping almost entirely at another. Russia is just another province of China at this point. So much for sovereignty.

Again, Beijing may beg to differ. China’s 210-megawatt HTR-PM, which World Nuclear News described as a small modular reactor, entered commercial operation in December 2023, and its Linglong One is reportedly in hot testing, aiming for the grid this year. Even a no-limits partnership, it seems, has limits on sharing the credit.

First, Norway isn’t in the EU. Norwegians have rejected joining. Not that facts ever troubled Mr.

Putin. And "not our business to judge" lasted all of…one sentence. Some of the criticism came from the leaders of Denmark and Sweden, both actual EU members.

Mette Frederiksen said the call wasn’t coordinated with other Europeans, and Ulf Kristersson said he wasn’t told in advance. Støre says all allies were given notice. Constructive for one participant, anyway.

Putin spent most of the call—planned for 30 minutes, it ran to 90—lecturing on medieval Slavic history, while Ukraine’s push for an immediate ceasefire barely came up, the Financial Times reported, citing three people familiar with the conversation. Stubb says the agenda included limits on strikes against energy infrastructure. On the night of the press conference, Russian strikes on energy infrastructure left at least 350,000 people around Dnipro without power.

Might need another, more constructive call. He has said this before, many times. Notably, in February 2022, asked by a Deutsche Welle reporter about the risk of war in Europe, Putin replied that of course Russia didn’t want one.

Nine days later, he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. You can see why European allies are taking Putin at his actions, not his word. And Russian hybrid warfare is heating up.

Hardly a smoke signal for peace. The reluctant warlord’s signature move: insist you don’t want a fight, then heavily imply how it ends. No one mentioned nuclear weapons.

No one needed to. Also, "I don’t want war, but I will willingly vaporize everyone" sounds a little contradictory from a noted humanitarian like Putin. Possibly because of what happened six days earlier, when Romania blamed Russia for a drone strike that sank the cargo ship Khoryv 13 nautical miles off Constanta, killing a crew member and leaving three missing.

At least seven merchant ships were hit off Romania and Bulgaria in two weeks. Romania’s prime minister called the attack "a flagrant violation of international law." Russia has denied responsibility for earlier drone attacks in the region.

One oil exporter hasn’t minded. The strait is in that state because Iran, Russia’s treaty partner, has been attacking and harassing ships there since U.S.

and Israeli strikes began in February. Russia’s Urals crude went from $57 a barrel on the eve of that war to $115 a month later. A tasty windfall.

This month, Washington waived sanctions on Russian diesel through April 2027. The first cargo under the deal loaded at Primorsk, on the Baltic, and was tracked off Helsinki signaling New York. The sea Putin warned could become another Hormuz is, for now, carrying his diesel to America.

Iran might quibble with "any." After the U.S.

-Israeli campaign killed its supreme leader, Putin offered condolences. The Kremlin said Tehran hadn’t asked for military help. Some would have been appreciated, we’re sure.

Their 2025 partnership treaty, unlike Russia’s pact with North Korea, has no mutual-defense clause. With friends like these… "On a global scale" is doing some pretty heavy lifting. In Ukraine alone, U.

N. monitors have verified at least 16,874 civilians killed since February 2022, including 820 children. They counted more civilian casualties in July than in any month since March 2022.

The week’s big humanitarian gesture, a local pause in Oleshky, took first lady Melania Trump to broker. Within minutes of it starting, Russia fired a wave of ballistic missiles at Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine. And the brutal, muddy trench warfare along the Ukrainian front lines looks awfully familiar.

In the Malian village of Bombori on July 10, more than 100 fighters from Russia’s Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps, alongside several Malian soldiers, rounded up Fulani men and boys under a tree, Human Rights Watch found. Nine civilians were killed, four of them children; one was beheaded. HRW sent its findings to Russia’s defense minister and, of course, got no reply.

Consultations, apparently, are by invitation only. Presumably "very carefully" offered to those who share the Russian spirit of delusion. And who want a lecture on Slavic history.