Former Latvian president and Montreal professor on Putin: ‘He’s a narcissist and a psychopath’

Former Latvian president and Canadian scholar Vaira Vike-Freiberga has sounded the alarm on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin for much of the last two decades.

With a PhD in psychology and a three-decade career teaching it under her belt, former Latvian president and Canadian scholar Vaira Vike-Freiberga is better equipped than most to evaluate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of mind – and her assessment isn’t flattering.

“He’s a narcissist and a psychopath, with no conscience whatsoever,” Vike-Freiberga says during an exclusive interview with Global News in Kuldiga, Latvia.

“And he’s a megalomaniac. He is definitely an egomaniac with very strong, paranoid tendencies.”

Vike-Freiberga should know – seeing as her political career has been inadvertently intertwined with the Russian president’s, whose siege on Ukraine has entered its third week.

After living in Canada for more than four decades, Vike-Freiberga became Latvia’s first female president in 1999, the same year Putin assumed power in Russia as prime minister.

In years since, she has gone to great lengths to distance Latvia from its former Soviet oppressors – ensuring its entry into both NATO and the European Union — and warning the rest of the world of the dangers Russia posed.

“I’m not alone in doing that, of course, there’s been many of us. And yes, from the moment when I returned to Latvia and started work as president … (I was warning about him).”

But those warnings were informed not only from an illustrious career in Canadian academia, but also from personal experience: Vike-Freiberga arrived in Toronto in 1954 as a refugee after Latvia fell under Soviet rule.