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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
He’s binge-watching House of Cards.
I hope it’s the terminal stage of his Neurosyphilis….
Is Putin dead? The Internet Certainly Thinks So
My money is on the plastic surgery theory or an illness. I don’t follow Russia too closely, but I do have a fair bit of knowledge on North Korea and the Kim dynasty from my own personal interest. Whenever Kim Jong Un fails to make an appearance for an extended period of time there is all sorts of speculation, especially from the South Korean press, but he always manages to turn up again. Strongmen who rely on their cults of personality don’t like to show up without looking their best. Unfortunately the idea that Putin is dead is probably wishful thinking.
Wow, first Hillary collapsing and now this – Claire could be dealing with a whole new ball game in her next post.
This is what happens when you visit those other two and slight Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov.
Scott,
At this point ‘all of the above’. I think it was Mean Joe Green who said “I just tackle the whole backfield and then start throwing out guys until I find the one with the ball.”
If there is a power struggle going on that would explain his absence from the scene. Maybe he is just trying to get the Nemtsov story nailed down and it won’t stay nailed.
Who knows what evil lurks in Putin’s Russia.
THE POWER TO CLOUD MEN’S MINDS.
THE SUN IS SHINING BUT THE ICE IS SLIPPERY.
Regards,
Jim
The only solid takeaway that can be drawn from this is that we have gone full circle and returned to Kremlinology, past is prologue. Stratfor seems to be eagerly embracing that route:
Kremlinology. It’s like the good old days.
I looked it up. It wasn’t Mean Joe Green, unless he said it too. It was Bubba Smith.
“I had my own way of tackling. I used to grab the whole backfield, then I threw guys out until I found the one with the ball”
In Putin’s Russia, photos airbrush you.
The only reason I looked it up, was so I could use it for my Status on Facebook! Thanks!
Duncan,
Go for it.
Regards,
Jim
Even good plastic surgery has recovery time.
He’s long overdue for a hair transplant. That probably takes a month to grow out.
Never count your dead dictators before they putrify.
Every time the markets at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange get squirrelly and no one knows why, the word goes out that Castro has died.
Poor Fidel has kicked the bucket every six weeks for twenty years.
He’s “hiking the Аппалачи Trail,” Sanford-style.
He’s “hiking the Аппалачи Trail,” Sanford-style.
He’s pining for the fjords.
He ate some bad knackwurst.
Well, frankly, I don’t know. But this sounds like the best analysis I’ve heard. (From Alexey Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskv):
I may be applying the wrong mental model, but it’s probably a reasonable one, because from what I know, Turkey and Russia are quite similar in some important ways. I went through many iterations of this scene in Turkey–“Erdoğan has cancer, everyone knows it, everyone’s gossiping about it, I know someone who knows his doctor, he’s sure, didn’t you see his eyebrows are thinning, where has he been lately, have you seen him?”
But he’s still all too alive, so far.
So my guess–based on no real knowledge whatsoever, just the kind of hunches you make if you assume “Every other place is just like the place I know best, and things are apt to happen the way they have in my experience”–is that Putin will show up again soon. Alive. He might have the flu, he might be getting a hair transplant, or perhaps there was a coup.
But that is a terrible way to look at foreign policy, and almost guaranteed to lead to disaster: The starting assumption should be, “It is not at all like what I know, and things may happen that are nothing like the way they do, in my experience.”
Thing about Russia is that getting it right matters a great deal. I don’t want my hunches on this. Neither should anyone. I want a sense that we have people who can do a lot better than me trying to figure this out, trained to do so, and doing their jobs properly.
What worries me is the thought that we (for some value of “we,” I do not necessarily mean the US, but “the collective capabilities of everyone who really has a huge interest figuring out what’s up in the Kremlin and making sure it isn’t something that might kill us anytime soon”) may not.
To do Kremlinology properly, you need people who have been taking the Kremlin seriously for a very long time. So seriously they don’t need the help of a translator, and know exactly who the real experts are–as opposed to the careerists trading on their “Kremlin expert” reputation.
I’m worried that “we” may have allowed that skill to atrophy to a dangerous level. I do know that this was true of Turkey when I lived there. A country in NATO and of huge strategic importance. Also one filled with good human beings, by the way. Which tears at my conscience daily. Watching our foreign policy at work there made me deeply concerned that the US has a huge problem, as does “the West.” I don’t know. I can’t know what’s really going on in Washington. But from Turkey, it looked as if we didn’t get it that we’re still a superpower–whether or not we want to be–and that when we fail to behave like one, bad things happen to real people.
I can promise you no one was doing the work to the highest professional standards on Turkey. That I know. I was able to do better with lousy Turkish and no deeper reason to be studying it than, “I wound up living here, so I have to figure out what’s going on here–it’s relevant to my survival, personally.” I seemed to be one of only a handful of Americans looking at it that way.
Clearly, many people who were claiming expertise in Washington did not view it that way. They were pegging their sense of “how to survive” to the local environment–as one does–and in Washington, you do that by sounding good at think tanks. I don’t understand how our foreign policy in Turkey could have been derived from assumptions made by anyone who took the place seriously enough to learn as much about it as you’d have to if you thought of it as “something I have to understand to survive.”
If that’s also true of the way we now see Kremlin, it’s an even bigger problem than “bad things will happen to faraway people.” Because the Kremlin is capable–literally–of killing every American alive. Some mistakes are ones you can get away with–although you still have to answer to a Higher Authority than the President. Not taking the Kremlin seriously is not the kind of mistake you can get away with.
So I hope we have enough people left who take the Kremlin seriously that we are institutionally capable of figuring out whether’s Putin’s having a hair transplant or whether he’s been whacked.
I worry, based on what I saw in Turkey.
Mike, I had to click 3 times to register a “like” on that. I was fighting two other readers.
I suggest the possibility Putin got a plastic surgeon referral from John Kerry. I swear, Kerry must be using so much tetrodotoxin that blowfish are going to show up on the endangered species list. Lotsa Japanese fugu bars are going to have to close.
[Edit: got my poisons mixed up. You’ll have to make up your own botulism joke. Kerry still looks like a lizard alien from V, though.]
There is a rumor floating around that his mistress, former gymnast and current parliamentarian Alina Kabayeva, had a kid by him, and that explains his absence. But I would think that she if were preggers, that would have leaked by now. She’s a well-known public figure in Russia.
It’s nearly noon here now, and there doesn’t seem to be any new news. Just more rumor-mongering – mysterious trucks at the Kremlin, the recall of personnel from the Russian embassy in London.
I just hope that whomever ends up with the car keys doesn’t decide to drive west. I’m about a four-hour tank drive away from the border.
I wonder if other people on Ricocet are noticing this pattern–the closer someone is to Russia, the more he or she is freaked out about it.
I’m in Paris. I’m not totally sanguine about things, Kremlin-wise. I’m thinkng, “Independent nuclear deterrent, probably I’ll be okay.” (And here I always thought thought De Gaulle was nuts about that–distance from NATO? What country wouldn’t want the exact opposite of that?) Well, turns out I’m thinking, “De Gaulle had some good instincts about things,” so 1) Do you know what it feels like for an Anglophone to write, “Thank God the French were right about military strategy?” If that doesn’t suggest something is wrong to anyone who can read this sentence, I don’t know what to say. 2) Alas, I suspect that by this point, many other people who were not blessed with a French general’s strategic foresight (God help us, yes, I wrote those words) are thinking, “Independent nuclear deterrent, and fast.”
Scott’s not allowed to lose it in quite the way I am owing to certain very appropriate taboos we place in our society against men ever discussing or showing their emotions-(unless it’s anger, men are allowed to show that, but rarely) but as you can see, Scott is utterly unafraid of the bastards and ready to kill them.
Now geographically, we may seem far away to some of you who are further from the bastards, but notice we’re communicating with you in this remarkable “instant” way. Other technologies can do that and it’s not as nice when they do.
Who’d have thought it when the Wall came down. I sure didn’t.
It’s no time to be freaked, yet. Actually, I was much more worried last year, when the invasion of Crimea began. There were plenty of news stories touting headlines like”Is Estonia next?” Then the U.S. 173rd Airborne stepped off a transport at Ämari air base west of Tallinn about a month after. My wife watched the soldiers march off the plane, and hummed the Mickey Mouse tune. The fear in the country (and it was palpable) dissipated immediately. So did my own.
The neighbor’s house is sending up smoke. Is it from the chimney, or is it on fire? No one can seem to tell. You keep an eye out, and keep your wallet and track shoes handy. Although, due to family reasons, my chances of actually running if the worst happened are pretty remote. Such is life for an expat in the borderlands.
Like you, Claire, I was a child of the Cold War. I grew up a couple miles away from a Titan missile base, and about 10 from the McConnell Air Force base south of Wichita. I fully expected to be annihilated if war ever broke out. Remember The Day After?
I found it ironic that my first flat in Estonia had a fallout shelter in the back yard. To protect from American nuclear attack. I find it also highly ironic that in my 40s, in the same war scenario today, a lightning strike by Iskander missiles would probably be the first sign. In the territory of the ex-Soviet Union. The 21st Century version of The Day After is this story, Tallinn Is Burning. And me, with it.
If the wheel of history turns, you just hope not to get run over by it, although the wise look at the past and expect it roll at some point.
I think the best-case scenario, at least in the short term, is that Putin has had some kind of medical problem. This website (I don’t know about the veracity of their reporting; I’ve never seen it until now) indicates he may have had a stroke. Any kind of power struggle will lead to an internal focus for the regime in the short run. I have no doubt that Putin himself is tempted to test NATO’s Article 5 resolve at some point.
On the next flagship podcast after Putin reappears, special guest DocJay should give a diagnosis.
Scott, your comment about annihilation is interesting. I grew up near Barksdale AFB. My father always told us not to worry about a nuclear war, that we’d all be dead nearly instantly. I think it gave me a slightly different perspective on life from all those people who worried about how they would survive the aftermath of nuclear war. But I’ve never taken the time to unpack and decipher exactly how my perspective is different.
Looks like Putin was involved in a motor accident
Something else he has in common with Bruce Jenner.
The latest Kremlin attempt to show Putin alive and well has backfired as the footage is revealed to be from last year:
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-is-missing-2015-3
What am I missing? The 2104 footage appeared to be in a different room from the 2015. Can’t Putin meet with someone more than once?
Claire,
Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to read this properly till now. Very interesting indeed.
Theories about Possible Perpetrators of the Murder of Boris Nemtsov
The above article from March 1 caught my eye. A very wide range of theories are assessed with some reasonable analysis on each one. What is striking is that the front runner is Putin’s government (thus Putin himself) as the most likely contractor. This is before the retraction of the confessions.
Here’s a interesting little coincidence from the article:
Like a scene out of the Godfather. Putin is signing the decree for “Special Forces Day” and Nemtsov is gunned down right outside the Kremlin. The message to anyone who would challenge the Godfather is clear. Just speculation but I think deserves to be theory most likely.
For the moment lets just assume Putin did it. His cover story with the Chechens who wanted to kill Nemtsov because Nemtsov supported Charlie Hebdo has fallen apart. Until he has his alibi in place he doesn’t want to be interviewed.
The much larger question is whether there is anyone else in Russia that can do anything about it and would.
Regards,
Jim
As you say, the wonder isn’t that those closer are concerned it is that those of us farther away take Russia so lightly. The anti-Western, particularly anti-US, hysteria is reaching levels not seen in some time.
At this point the most dangerous outcome could well be that Putin truly is incapacitated as he might be replaced by someone even more reckless at a time when passions in Russia are running high.
Fake ballistic missile paraded in the heart of Moscow that read “to be personally delivered to Obama.”