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

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.

So, in many ways, she sees 2022 as history repeating itself.

“When I look now at the scenes of women with babies in their arms, waiting at the border to be processed and so on, of course, it brings back very vivid memories,” she says.

As war rages in Ukraine, Vike-Freiberga is staying at her country home in western Latvia, in the ancient village of Kuldiga. It’s quieter here, she explains, but that doesn’t mean the work hasn’t followed her.

“It’s my 14th day in a row,” she laments, stepping into the sparse, white room of an art gallery, which is closed for the winter. The only decoration in the bare room is small props brought in by assistants – a couple of flower bunches in vases, a burning candle and four mini-flags of Latvia, the EU, Ukraine and NATO. There is little natural light nor, it seems, any indoor heating.

It doesn’t seem to bother Vike-Freiberga. She’s dressed in a light sweater and skirt, in head-to-toe pink, serving as a bold contrast to her surroundings in more ways than one.

“With every year I get older, I get more tired,” the 84-year-old says.

But there are few signs of fatigue as she powers through a two-hour monologue, chronicling a life that was sent spinning off its axis at age seven. That was 1944, when her family fled the Latvian capital of Riga as it became part of the Soviet Union.

“I still have certain nightmares that come from that,” Vike-Freiberga says slowly.

“I see scenes being filmed by BBC journalists at the border of Ukraine and in Poland right now … mothers with small children … men are asked to stay behind and fight and the children seem to be clutching a little animal. And I remember that I was told that if I wanted to take my old, dilapidated teddy, I could not take my new doll that I had just received for Easter.”

At the end of the Second World War, an estimated 11 million people were displaced from their home countries.

Vike-Freiberga escaped to Germany with her parents and baby sister, where they were housed in a displaced person’s camp in Lubeck, in the northern part of the country near Denmark.

She says that, even now, she has nightmares every night about the conditions at the camp.

Within three weeks of arriving, her baby sister died.

In 1949, when the camps were closed, the family moved to Casablanca in French Morocco, and five years later, to Canada. The journey, by ship, was arduous – largely due to their newfound identities as Soviet citizens.

“We stopped in Portugal.… Soviet citizens were not allowed ashore. And when I went to Portugal decades later, on a state visit as the president of the Republic of Latvia newly freed, I was told the British story of how Portugal had never signed on to recognizing the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics,” she recalls, with a wry smile.

“And I said, ‘My dear sir. It may have been so in the offices of government, but the police of Lisbon told us otherwise.’”

Arriving at Halifax, Vike-Freiberga remembers her five-year-old brother’s first impressions more than her own: “He was amazed at how green everything was.”

The family took up residence in Toronto, optimistic about a brighter future.

But Vike-Frieberga, at 16, couldn’t speak English. Rather than finish high school, she was expected to get a job immediately and help her family pay back the debts that helped them escape communism.

“(My mother) said we have borrowed money from our friends and we feel embarrassed. You know, any time we spend some money, they’ll be wondering whether you should be buying a dining table or whether you should be paying back part of your debt.”

Becoming a bank teller and finishing school by correspondence didn’t hold Vike-Freiberga back from academic excellence. Her post-secondary school resume includes a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Toronto, a job as a translator (by that stage she was fluent in English, French, Latvian, Spanish and German), a stint teaching Spanish and work as a clinical psychologist.

In 1965, she earned her PhD at McGill University in Montreal, and spent the next three decades teaching in the psychology department at the French-speaking University of Montreal.

It was here that she met her husband, a professor of computer science, and gave birth to a son and a daughter.

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Having spent more time in Canada than in her homeland, Vike-Freiberga attempted to keep her family in touch with their heritage via the Latvian community in Canada. She still harboured an intent to return to her homeland, but as the years wore on and independence eluded the country, it became a far-off goal.

“I was brought up as a child of refugees who felt it was their sacred duty to keep the flame alive of Latvian identity … no matter what the conditions,” she says.

Vike-Freiberga did not harbour political aspirations for herself in Canada. She believed that door was closed to her. She describes her political outlook, at least for the first year as she faced intrusive questions about her heritage, with “repugnance.”

“As for local politics, I thought, ‘Well, it’s not for me, it’s for Canadians. I have no rights. I am not a citizen. I cannot vote. Why should I be interested in how they, you know, how they quarrel among themselves or what they do?’” she says.

Around the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Latvia was granted its long-awaited independence and Vike-Freiberga intended to return after retirement. That came in 1998, after she became professor emerita at the University of Montreal and took an early retirement package.

“A few months later, I get a telephone call. They said, ‘Hello, this is Riga calling you,’” Vike-Freiberga says. “It was the prime minister of Latvia.”

It was an invitation to take up the position of director of the newly founded Latvian Institute, founded on the Goethe-Institut and aimed at promoting the study of the Latvian language and culture abroad. She accepted, returning to her homeland in June 1998 after a 54-year absence.

Her return made headlines, but not the kind she might have expected.

She’d been invited on a radio show to comment on the country’s push to establish Latvian as its only official language, rather than recognizing the high number of Russian speakers with a bilingual country.

Pundits expected her, fresh off a plane from Quebec, to support a two-language solution.

“I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re looking at the wrong door because precisely because I come from Quebec, I am firmly convinced that we are being brought nearly to the status of minority in our own native land. We deserve to have our language protected by it being the only official (language).’”

The quote spread like wildfire. Rumours began swirling she’d make a good president. Eight months later, that’s exactly what happened.

After not originally being a candidate, the Latvian Parliament failed to elect a president in the first round and Vike-Freiberga was chosen as a compromise candidate – a highly respected outsider not affiliated with a political party.

So was it important to her to be the country’s first female president?

“No,” she says. “It was important to me to be the first president of Latvia who came from the diaspora.”

Vike-Freiberga speaks passionately about her time in office – while admitting that both speaking passionately and taking office weren’t seen as the most becoming attributes, as Latvian women were not “expected to be ambitious.”

But she was. In 2004, in her second term as president, Vike-Freiberga secured membership of both NATO and the European Union for her country.

Videos from her speech at the NATO summit in Prague in 2002, when Latvia was invited to join, show an assured Vike-Freiberga confidently telling assembled world leaders that NATO membership would bring Latvia “hope for a better future,” as an impressed-looking George W. Bush, then United States president, nods along.

“We don’t want to be in some grey zone of political uncertainty, we want to enjoy the full sunshine of the liberties and the rights that NATO has been defending for so long,” Vike-Freiberga told the summit.

When I ask why these two memberships were so important for her, the answer comes back to the same thing it often does: Russia.

“We had to get out of the clutches of the Russian Federation because they were making no secret of the fact that they were just so truly shocked, bewildered and angry at all these republics breaking away,” she says.

Back then, the Baltic states felt safe, she says, because the Russian army was “a mess.”

“But we were wondering when our turn would come, when Russia would feel strong enough.”

Which brings us to Putin.

Over the past two decades, Vike-Freiberga has seldom pulled any punches when it comes to the Russian president.

Six years ago, in an interview with Ukrainian media in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vike-Freiberga made a sobering warning: that Europe “has a lot of things to worry about,” specifically around its borders, and should be investing in defence infrastructure and ways to combat disinformation and propaganda.

On Putin, she said: “There is no trust when you have been stabbed in the back.”

Over the years, not much seems to have changed. But, she says, his war in Ukraine shows he’s gone further than even she expected.

“I think he’s become notably unhinged in recent times. I think this invasion is not the actions of a sane man interested in the welfare of his country. So I do think he really is getting unhinged now,” Vike-Freiberga says.

“Before he was only evil and mean, now he’s also evil, mean and unhinged. It’s a bad combination.”

But she does not believe Putin has acted alone. She believes the Russian people are somewhat complicit, and is at odds with U.S. President Joe Biden’s assessment that this is “Putin’s war.”

“They are quite a number of Russian citizens who quite happily believe all the lies that they are told. They believe all the falsifications of history that Putin has been fabricating, much as the communist system rewrote history before,” she says.

As war broke out on Feb. 24, Vike-Freiberga wasted no time in putting out a press release calling on the West to introduce sanctions immediately.

“I congratulate all the countries who this time, unlike 2014, actually managed to do it in a few days,” she says.

But she says more needs to be done. For instance, countries should stop buying Russian oil outright. Next, the European Union should allow countries such as Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine to join immediately, as they have requested. Such countries did not recognize its importance in the past, she believes.

During her presidency, she recalls speaking to her counterpart in Moldova about joining the European Union, who was worried it would antagonize Russia and they would stop buying Moldovan wine.

She also discussed it with then-Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma.

“He said, ‘We are such a big country and we are in so many ways so self-sufficient. We do not feel that we should align ourselves with the West in a too open way because after all, we do have cultural and historical ties with Russia, and we know it will annoy the Russians if we do. And who needs it, you know? So we would like to stay sort of in between, on our own, without aligning ourselves with any side.’”

Life post-presidency has not slowed down for Vike-Freiberga. In 2007, she was an official candidate for the United Nations secretary-general post but lost out to South Korean politician Ban Ki Moon – with two vetoes from Russia and China.

Seven years later, she served as president of the Club of Madrid, the world’s largest forum of former heads of state and government until 2020. She remains active on the international speaking circuit and is a vocal pro-European and continues to speak out on issues relating to social justice and equality.

These days, however, she doesn’t believe the United Nations has any power to act. In 2016, she said the international body was “completely paralyzed to help” Ukraine in its standoff with Russia and now, she believes it remains irrelevant in the face of the Ukraine war.

She wraps up the interview with one final warning.

“Colonialism is a thing of the past. Imperialism should be a thing of the past, and we will never have peace in the world until all nations are equally respected, just like we will not have democracy in the world until all persons in the country are equally respected.”