Russian President Vladimir Putin is making the West anxious.

He has stationed more than 100,000 troops on his country’s border with Ukraine, and issued a list of impossible demands to the US and NATO. Earlier this week, President Biden said that he expects Putin to send troops over the border.

“Do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO, as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will.” 

“It’s not clear what Russia’s central demand is,” said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

For years, Western leaders have scratched their heads over Putin. Security analysts consider him arrogant and reckless. In the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, President Obama suggested that Putin acted irrationally, counter to his long-term interests. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called him “wholly irrational,” a “megalomaniac,” and speculated that there is a “5 percent chance” that the Russian president is delusional.

While the CIA once publicly declared North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “rational” (even though he starves his people and murders family members), there has never been an official public statement on the Russian president’s state of mind. The one exception is a dubious 2008 study contracted by the Pentagon and written by authors who have never met the Russian president, who theorized that Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, which affects all of his decisions.

Now, Putin is seizing his moment and triggering more questions than ever. He recently deployed “peacekeeping” forces to Kazakhstan under the pretext of stamping out an anti-government protest when, in fact, he was testing out a potential playbook for invading Ukraine. This week, he flooded Belarus with troops — ostensibly for joint military drills. NATO is concerned the situation could escalate into World War III if Putin uses Belarus, which borders Poland and Lithuania, as a springboard to attack Ukraine.

As frustrating and unpredictable as the Russian strongman’s actions can be, there is a method to Vladimir’s “madness.” His logic is Russian, and partly Soviet, too — rather than American or Western. His actions reflect Russian cultural norms and standards of behavior. This is why many Russians continue to be on his side.

As a former intelligence officer and specialist on Russia and Putin, I can offer my own profile of the Russian president, using his own words.

Putin’s worldview and character are shaped by four factors: Russia’s and his family’s survival of World War II, the humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, his athletic training in judo, and his career as an intelligence agent. Putin has always wanted to right the wrong of the USSR’s “catastrophic” collapse. He believes he has made Russia into a “confident great power with a big future and glorious people.” As a judo practitioner, he believes that the key to successful politics is to “control your opponent by seeing his strong and weak points” at all times.

Putin believes that “if the fight is unavoidable, you must strike first,” that “treason is the biggest crime on earth and traitors must be punished,” and that “if you don’t want to feed your own army, you will be feeding someone else’s.”  Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Putin’s mindset is that the “West must be kept on edge,” Russia must “knock its adversaries’ teeth out” and that “politeness and weapons can accomplish much more than politeness alone.”

Putin, whose father served in the Soviet secret police and ran sabotage operations behind enemy lines in Germany during World War II, has morphed from a hooligan — fighting rats on the streets of St. Petersburg — into a KGB intelligence operative and finally a statesman. He is highly intelligent, relentless and ruthless. He smells his opponents’ weakness with the sixth sense of a snake.

Meanwhile, the White House is scrambling, drumming up additional new draconian sanctions that Biden’s “experts” desperately hope will halt Putin’s mission.

Whatever Putin does next, he’s enjoying seeing the West squirm.

To Russians, that’s entirely logical.

Rebekah Koffler is a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and currently a strategic intelligence analyst with The Lindsey Group. She is the author of  “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.”