Eva Jinek really jumped out of her skin yesterday in her talk show on RTL 4. After an emotional item about the Ukraine war, she lost her self-control: “Putin is an asshole!”
Television programs have been dominated for weeks now by Putin’s war in Ukraine. Yesterday Eva Jinek had a couple sitting at the table who drove to the Polish border with one goal: to collect Ukrainian refugees to receive at home. “I’m going back tomorrow”, said the conscious gentleman.
Asshole
Eva then: “Who are you going to get?” Him: “Karina’s best friend.” She: “Great.”
The compassionate couple caused applause in the studio. Eva wanted to close the item, but shot full. She quickly recovered. “Okay… I can do it.”
Then Eva loses her composure: “We’re going to talk about that bastard: Putin. The war in Ukraine continues and no one knows where it will end. Sorry for this non-talk show worthy language, but it had to get out. The big question is: what drives Russian President Putin?”
Unrecognizable
Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission, explained to Eva that Putin may have gone off the rails. “He’s a different man now than he was two years ago. In recent years, maybe it’s because of Covid and that he has been in isolation, now I don’t recognize him anymore… I don’t recognize him as I got to know him.”
“He is very afraid, they say, of Covid. Very few people get access to him. Because he has so much power, no one is willing to tell him the whole truth, so I don’t rule out someone saying to him, ‘We’ll sort it out. A few days and it’s over.’ And yes, now he is in trouble.”
crazy patient
Eva: “Here in the West people say very easily, even at this table regularly: ‘He’s crazy. He’s gone crazy. He’s a patient actually.’ Is that the case or does he follow his own ratio and we just don’t see what that is?”
Russia expert Mariëlle Wijermars said: “I think we should be very careful about thinking: he is crazy. That’s a very simple explanation. I don’t think that is of any use to us. Analytically speaking, it means nothing to us, because then we are at the mercy of a madman. I hope that is not the situation.”
Putin’s Empire
Frans thinks Putin is in too much of a hurry. “He just thought: I still have a little while, I’m 69, I don’t have the eternal existence as president of Russia, and my country still has a while because now they still need my oil and gas, if it can be made more sustainable later. I no longer sell that to them, I have not invested anything in another economy, now I am still powerful, now I have to establish my empire.”
“That’s why I think he’s in a hurry. In that rush, I think he made the biggest mistake of his life.”
Fragment
French in Jinek: