Bernie Ecclestone Says He'd 'Take a Bullet' For Friend Vladimir Putin

Former Formula One Boss Bernie Ecclestone told Good Morning Britain that he would "take a bullet" for longtime friend Vladimir Putin, the Russian President currently spearheading the invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

"I'd still take a bullet for him," Ecclestone told the show. "I'd rather it didn't hurt, but if it does I'd still take a bullet because he's a first-class person. What he's doing is something that he believed was the right thing he was doing for Russia."

The illegal invasion of Ukraine is rooted in deep Soviet revanchism, with territorial expansion a lynchpin of Putin's vision of restoring Russia as a key power broker of the global order. But the reality has seen the Russian economy isolated and crippled by sanctions as the country loses more soldiers in a few months than the U.S. lost in 20 years in the Middle East. The invasion has been decried by countless human rights experts for gross violations of international norms and high civilian casualties. Ecclestone, however, thinks the entire war is just a misunderstanding because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not do a good enough job of talking Putin out of invading his country.

"I'm quite sure that Ukraine, if they'd wanted to get out of it, could have done," he said. When asked by the hosts if he thinks Zelensky was to blame for not avoiding this conflict—a ridiculous accusation when you consider that Russia invaded Crimea long before Zelensky took power—Ecclestone replied "absolutely."

He also mentioned Zelensky's past as a comedian and said that he was still acting like a comedian now. Putin, meanwhile, Ecclestone considers a serious, respectable businessman and a "first-class person" who did not mean to launch the most ferocious military campaign on the European continent since World War II in an effort to drag the Russian state back to the Stalinist era.

"Unfortunately, [Putin]'s like a lot of business people, certainly like me," Ecclestone said. "We make mistakes from time to time. When you've a mistake you have to do the best you can to get out of it."

Of course, Putin could get out of it merely by withdrawing his troops. But Ecclestone puts the onus on Zelensky, for whom coming to the table would likely mean relinquishing land rightfully given to the Ukrainian state by the Russian government itself.

This certainly isn't the first time the former F1 boss has said something remarkably controversial with flippancy. The Guardian points out that Ecclestone, in a 2009 interview with The Times of London, seemed to praise Adolf Hitler as a go-getter.

"In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done," Ecclestone told The Times.

While some of the Nazi's crimes were the ideas of other men, Hitler literally wrote the book on the racist and anti-semitic ideology that underpinned their most heinous acts. Like all strongmen—Putin included—despite not directly participating in all of his regime's crimes, Hitler created a cult of personality where everyone knew what the mission was. Executing that goal in the most brutal and sycophantic way was rewarded, eventually leading him to lose touch with any sense of reality on the ground. As Putin's invasion stumbles and Russian inventory gets chewed up, that historical example is likely more instructive to him than Ecclestone's view.

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