Madeleine Albright in her final op-ed described Putin as ‘small and pale’ and ‘almost reptilian’

• Madeleine Albright recalled her first meeting with Vladimir Putin in her final op-ed. 
• She described the Russian president as “so cold as to be almost reptilian.”
• Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state, died Wednesday, aged 84. 

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her final op-ed before her death Wednesday recalled her unease after her first meeting with Vladimir Putin when he took power 20 years ago. 

In the piece published in the New York Times on February 23, the day before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Albright recalled her first impressions of the new Russian leader after meeting him in 2000.

He had just taken over from Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s leader, and was acting president. At the time, Albright was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.

“Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin,” recalled Albright. 

“Flying home, I recorded my impressions. ‘Putin is small and pale,’ I wrote, ‘so cold as to be almost reptilian.'”

Her notes also included the line that “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness,” appearing to foreshadow the invasion of Ukraine.

At the time of their meeting in 2000, Russia was seeking better relations with the West. In the decades since Putin has rejected those ties to enact what Albright described in the op-ed as “Stalin’s playbook” and impose a repressive dictatorship.

In the essay, Albright went on to warn that if Russia invaded Ukraine it would be “an historic error,” and described the consequences Russia would likely face, including a determined Ukrainian resistance, crippling economic sanctions, and a galvanized NATO alliance.

Many of her predictions in the essay were borne out in the weeks since its publication. 

Albright, who was the first woman to serve as Secretary of State, died of cancer in New York on Wednesday, aged 84. 

Albright was born in what was then Czechoslovakia. Her family first fled when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939, and moved to the US when Soviet-backed Communists took power in 1948. 

In her final years she warned of declining faith in democracy, and the rise of fascist authoritarianism. She was a critic of Donald Trump during his term as president.