If Kremlinology made for a viable career track at the Pentagon during the cold war, Putinology is its pale 21st-century successor, complete with geopolitical guessing games, spycraft and the unknowable machinations of the man inside Red Square. The latest contribution to the field comes courtesy of a Pentagon thinktank: a suggestion that Vladimir Putin has an autistic disorder.

Studies from 2008 and 2011, commissioned by the Pentagon and revealed by USA Today through a freedom of information request, suggest Putin has “an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions” and may be Asperger syndrome. But the studies, which focused on videos of the Russian president, do not claim to make a diagnosis and are primarily the brainchild of one person, Brenda Connors of the US Naval War College (USNWC) in Newport, Rhode Island.

Connors, a “movement patterns analysis” expert, is a former State Department official and professional dancer who has been described, by a psychologist from the University of Chicago, as a “dancer and diplomat”.

She recruited specialists to examine footage of Putin. One of them, Dr Stephen Porges, a University of North Carolina psychologist, told the Guardian: “Everyone should drop this whole thing about Asperger’s and autism.”

Porges never saw either USNWC report but said the objective was never diagnosis, which would be impossible with so little evidence.

“You don’t diagnose based on videotapes,” he said.

The objective of the exercise, Porges said, was simply to improve diplomacy with Putin, who he said has “difficulty basically feeling calm in complex social settings”, like many large diplomatic functions.

“The idea was to look at these videos,” Porges said, “and see how can you then structure diplomatic settings.” Putin’s face is “relatively flat in social settings”, he said, and “if the upper part of their face doesn’t show much emotion, it means they’re not really even there”.

“It wasn’t an exuberant face of engagement. It wasn’t a Bill Clinton,” he said.

Porges’s conclusion was a pragmatic one: to have more productive meetings with Putin, speak with him in small groups and quiet, private settings. Putin showed behaviors and facial expressions that suggest “little asocial qualities” shared by people with autistic disorders, he said, but also possessed by many people without autistic disorders, including combat veterans, trauma survivors and your everyday awkward neighbor.

“It doesn’t mean those people have autism,” Porges said.

Connors’ findings were less circumspect, although she admitted limitations without brain scans. She wrote that Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy” and that he “carries a neurological abnormality”.

A self-described “consultant” on the report, cardiothoracic surgeon A Thomas Pezzella, chose not to describe his own contribution to the research, saying: “Brenda did most of the work.”



That work also suggested that Putin may have suffered a stroke, possibly in utero, which affected his ability to speak and left him jerking and seeming to drag the right side of his body. In 2013, many noted that Putin suddenly seemed to struggle with English, a language he has spoken and sung in many times before. In a 2005 interview with the Atlantic, Connors said of the Russian leader’s judo hobby: “He is like that ice skater who had a club foot and became an Olympic skater.”

Connors also compared his movement and psychology to a reptile’s – “they patrol their borders and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively” – and struck a note of pathos and admiration regarding his supposed injuries, writing that “this is a deep, old, profound loss that the has learned to cope with magnificently”.

Connors concluded that Putin did not crawl as an infant, had likely always had a strange stare and had a “sense of self [that] is a work in progress”.

She also considered Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister and former president, to be an “action man” both “inept” at sharing ideas and who “since adolescence … has exhibited a physical armoring or disunity which inhibits harmonious movement”.

The Naval War College declined to provide the Guardian with a phone number for Connors, who created the reports for the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), a secretive, long-term thinktank operated within the Pentagon.

A Pentagon spokesperson, Lt Col Valerie Henderson, told the Guardian the reports “have not informed any policy decisions by the Department of Defense”.

Henderson said Connors has since contributed more research for ONA.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, another consultant on the research and the founder of the School for Body-Mind Centering, “an integrated and embodied approach to body and consciousness”, was not immediately available for comment.

In 2012 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of autism diagnoses rose 20% between 2006 and 2008. Experts have warned against the dangers of grouping people who struggle socially with those who have genuine disorders.

The label of Asperger’s, in particular, has been tossed in the direction of many accomplished people, including Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett. In 2012, the American Psychiatric Association decided to change the way it defines the disorder.