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Coup? Bad Plastic Surgery? What Has Happened to Vladimir Putin?
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the tradition of all authoritarian leaders, is an ever-present figure in his country’s media.
I once saw a story on Russian TV in the early 2000s (from my cozy confines of Estonia) where Putin stopped by a Russian pickle stand shaded by a giant tree. The whole point of the story was how he loved the pickles. The pickle cart owner, an elderly woman, swore afterwards that the tree that shaded her stand was now holy ground.
That nightly fixture of Russian television has not been seen in public since March 5 — a full week. The Kremlin-controlled channels are currently relying on old footage when they reference him. Putin was supposed to fly to Kazakhstan this week to meet with his fellow dictator club jacket-wearers, Kazakh President Nusultan Nazabayev and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko. Putin didn’t show. Media reports suggested he was “ill.”
DEBKA, an Israel-oriented intelligence site that I discovered about the time of the Persian Gulf War, says that there was a death announcement for Putin, online for about 20 minutes, on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s website early Thursday. I take DEBKA’s posts with a healthy grain of salt, and have yet to see a screenshot of the website post.
Russian analyst Paul Goble, a former colleague of mine at a university in Tallinn, suggests on his blog, Window on Eurasia, that there has been a schism between Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin. Kadyrov is the current leader of the former breakaway province of Chechyna, and a fierce Putin backer – based on the financial payoffs Putin has given him to stay in line. The breakage between the two happened after Chechens were accused of being the assassins in the death of Boris Nemtsov two weeks ago. Kadyrov came out in support of the accused. Goble suggests in another post that there might be a tension developing in the upper echelons of the military against the Kremlin leadership.
The international English-language media is starting to take notice.
So what say you, Ricochet Kremlinologists? (Isn’t that weird that the term is still useful more than 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union? But such is our lot in viewing an opaque dictatorship.)
When I first heard rumblings of this a couple days ago, I would have put my money down on Putin’s recuperation from another plastic surgery (there’s a rumor that the man is terrified of aging – and he has gotten ridiculously smooth in the last few years), but now I am not so sure. There seems to be… something going on. And that could be anything from bad Botox to a full coup.
Has Vlad been pickled himself? Place your bets.
Published in General
Claire & All,
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Putin has Lost Monopoly on Use of Force and Balance among Force Structures
Could be very interesting if someone got that evidence out to where it could be published on the Web. Maybe the Shadow?
Regards,
Jim
I have zero idea… besides health… why he’d be laying low, but has anyone considered that maybe he’s calculated that staying out of the public eye for awhile might be a good move with the Crimean situation and the Nemtsov incident? Even if he had nothing to do with Nemtsov, the West certainly thinks he did, and sometimes, the best thing to do is simply go dark and let things die down in the press.
I figured out what Putin’s been up to: draining the Gulf of Mexico.
Mike,
Why you crazy Texacan. I think you’d bring a violin to an artillery duel.
Regards,
Jim
Doug,
Hillary was in no rush to “Meet the Press” to explain her email server and when she did it didn’t come off so well. I think Putin has the same problem with the Nemtsov assassination.
They both have the same problem. They’re guilty.
Regards,
Jim
According to a Swiss tabloid, he’s in Switzerland with his girlfriend while she gives birth to his child:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/11471579/Vladimir-Putins-girlfriend-has-given-birth.html
Looking back on it, wasn’t that the most bizarre aspect of growing up when we did? Hey, if war starts, we’ll be atomic ash. At least it will be quick, so there’s a positive! It’s hard to unpack for the generations who didn’t live through it.
And some people say violins never solved anything.
Russian car dash-cams are the best dash-cams. It’s a thing that pretty much everyone driving in Russia has because of the risk of scam artists that step in front of moving vehicles to claim damages. This is my favorite collection.
If you read David Satter’s book, Darkness at Dawn, Putin’s own driver kills a couple of common Russian citizens way before he becomes President (and the driver avoids any kind of justice). It’s the way things evolved in Russia after the downfall.
And I will say, that Satter’s work crystallized a lot of things for me about the Russia that exists today. There is a reason the Kremlin kicked Satter out of the country last year.
His section on the 1999 Russian apartment bombings are horrifying chapters. I had some understanding that there were conspiracy theories about how the FSB blew up their own citizens to precipitate Russia’s second war in Chechnya (which helped Putin cement his power), but the people saying it were always Putin’s arch-enemies – Berezovsky, etc. His reporting in that book makes me think it is quite true, and fundamental in understanding Russia under the current management.
Hillary can only DREAM of having the kind of, er immunity, from awkward press questions Puty does. “Do you like one lump or two of Po210 with your tea?”…..
No sweat. Just Duck and Cover….
Scott Abel #40
For me, Sovietology goes like this: they will act in their official capacity in ways that would get most mobsters whacked for rocking the boat. We should always present them a strong enough, wary enough, confident enough entity that they take us seriously.
They do not take us seriously right now, and no amount of navel-gazing about their motivations or methods will help. At all.
The Republican Party was completely bred out by forty years of democrat domination. Seventy years of Soviet death-grip on the Russian psyche does not simply go away. It replaced it.