Vladimir putin

Suddenly, we are all diagnosticians. Clips of a puffy Putin slurring his words, his hands twitching or clutching a table for grim death, have led to all kinds of speculation about his health. It does seem probable that he is suffering from some ailments, to be sure. However, we need to be careful we do not get carried away with the speculation. Putin is notoriously private and his health is considered well off-limits. For a man who built much of his personal brand on his judo-fighting, ice hockey-playing, bare-chested horseback-riding persona, illness and ageing are obviously sensitive topics. Nonetheless, it has long been known that he suffers from recurring back problems, and appears to have undergone surgery more than once.

During the Cold War, the Soviets would place defectors from the West under house arrest as soon as they arrived in Russia. The assumption was that, as soon as they realized what a dump the USSR was, they would try to sneak back home. And they were probably right. Still, it’s a credit to the Soviet propaganda machine that they showed up in the first place. Back then, Russia did a great job of marketing itself. They paid top dollar to seduce high-ranking scientists and intelligence officials, while young radicals lined up to do the Kremlin’s bidding. Their disinformation was second to none. And today? Well, put it this way. Last week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a Nazi.

It is a story of ingenuity, cunning and farce that would have done credit to Mr. Toad, escaping his prison bondage by dressing as a washerwoman. Lucy Shtein, one of the members of the Russian protest art collective Pussy Riot, recently revealed how she managed to flee the country while dressed in the bright green attire of a food delivery company. Along with her constant familiar Mr. Rat — a pet rodent who, as is often the way of these things, has become a social media breakout star — Shtein managed to leave her flat in central Moscow, where she had been under house arrest for more than a year.

It has been reported this week that Vladimir Putin is shifting responsibility for covert operations in Ukraine to a different intelligence agency. The Fifth Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has now reportedly been usurped by ‘military intelligence’ – still widely known by its old acronym of GRU, but actually called the GU, the main directorate of the general staff. Lt Gen. Vladimir Alekseev, first deputy head of the GU, is now expected to take over Russia’s intelligence capabilities in Ukraine. To some this is evidence of inter-agency conflict and the decline of the FSB inside the Kremlin’s walls. But it is more likely that Putin is simply digging in for a long war.

“Victory Day” is one of the most solemn events on the Russian calendar. Every year on May 9, the country gets together to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in what Russians call “the Great Patriotic War,” in which as many as 26 million Soviet troops and civilians perished. It’s a time for reflection, for an appreciation of history, and, yes, for pomp and circumstance, with Russian troops decorated in dazzling uniforms marching in unison throughout Moscow's Red Square. This year’s Victory Day celebrations, however, had much of the world on edge. In next-door Ukraine, Russian forces were taking a beating, with smaller but nimbler and more determined Ukrainian units continuing to mount stiff resistance against a Russian military offensive in the Donbas.

Almost every night in Russia, it seems, a government building bursts into an unexplained fire. Fuel depots, office buildings, infrastructure hubs — and once a bridge. No doubt people have their theories. Insinuation abounds. "Karma is a cruel thing," one Ukrainian official has said on Telegram. But in the main, both the Russian government and Ukraine maintain an eloquent silence. The metaphor is apt. The fires are an unexpected consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine, an eventuality, no doubt, that no one in the Kremlin inner circle anticipated, or planned for. And yet they burn merrily nonetheless.

Vladimir Lenin famously said that there are “weeks where decades happen.” He was talking about the Bolshevik Revolution, but the panic-stricken weeks after Vladimir Putin shocked even his own people by invading "brotherly" Ukraine will also be remembered as an intensely transformative period in Russia’s history, when the ground shifted and Moscow was yanked back to its Soviet past. Those crazy weeks when my phone rang non-stop now feel like decades in retrospect, especially from the perspective of New York. The changes were apparent even after the first mad days of the "special operation." Anti-war Russians had panicked at Putin’s cruel gambit and fled the country by the tens of thousands, along with thousands of Western expats.

Is Vladimir Putin in pain? Until now, there has been plenty of chatter about the wellbeing of his minister of defence, Sergei Shoigu. Before the war, this veteran political survivor from the Yeltsin era was famous for being photographed on manly Siberian expeditions with his new patron, the bare-chested saviour of ‘All the Russias’. Putin and Shoigu camped out together in the taiga, with moody fireside photos and a spot of fishing – ‘Brokeback Mountain 2’, jested Russian bloggers. Though in reality, the two looked a more like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in a dreary remake: Frumpy Old Men.

The beginning of the year has not gone as well as it could have for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mostly because he is now dead, but also because Zhirinovsky, a Russian politician of the “managed” (pro-Kremlin) opposition, predicted and vigorously supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Zhirinovsky were able to follow the campaign from his hospital bed, it could not have met his expectations. The imperial Russia of his imagination ought to have come into glorious existence, but its armed forces instead suffered reversal and humiliation. Zhirinovsky was the long-time leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party — a grouping that, as many wags have separately concluded, was under his leadership neither liberal nor democratic nor, in some lights, a party.