What’s really going on with Vladimir Putin’s health?
Weeks ago, Vladimir Putin used the silly rationale that Emmanuel Macron refused to take a Russian COVID test as an excuse to sit on the opposite end of a roughly twenty foot table while meeting with him. Now the Kremlin has released a photo of Putin meeting with his own top advisers, and they’re all bunched up at one end of a similarly lengthy table, with Putin alone at the other end. So what gives?
I get Putin keeping his own advisers at the far end of the table. One of them could be trying to take him out. But Putin also did the same thing with Macron, who obviously wasn’t going to try to poison or stab him. This all suggests Putin could be physically ill.
If Putin is indeed doing all of this due to a fear of catching COVID, why is he suddenly so paranoid about it now, with COVID in the midst of a major downswing in terms of spread and severity? Is Putin now suffering from the kind of illness that would make it particularly dangerous for him to catch even a milder case of COVID, or even catch a cold?
Various experts have also pointed out that Putin’s face appears to look different in his latest television appearances. Is he so ill that he’s trying to use pancake makeup to hide it, and that’s why he’s afraid to let anyone, friend or foe, get near enough to see him up close?
Or has Putin simply succumbed to paranoid delusions due to some kind of mental illness? He’d be right to fear his own advisers at this point. But there’s no way he could rationally fear that the President of France was going to slip poison in his drink. Mental illness would explain why Putin’s overall behavior has become so incoherently self defeating of late. Mental illness does not turn someone evil. But Putin has always been evil, just a rational and pragmatic kind of evil that allowed him to always come out on top. Now Putin is behaving like a two bit dictator who has no idea how to succeed with his evil.
Some have suggested that Putin could be facing early stage dementia. This would certainly cause him to lose a step – and that alone can determine whether a villain remains a step ahead and succeeds, or falls a step behind and fails. Perhaps the reason we’re only now seeing this kind of weird and self defeating behavior from Putin is that because he’s lost a step, this is the first time he’s ever found himself truly losing. Maybe he was always going to unravel like this if he was ever cornered, and he was just never previously cornered.
The reality is that we don’t (yet) have any way of knowing what’s changed with Putin of late. We just know that, based on the available evidence, something has changed. Given what’s at stake, it’s worth watching for additional evidence that could support the premise that Putin has become physically ill, mentally ill, or terminally ill. He’s always been this evil. But until recently he’s never been openly paranoid or incoherently incompetent when it comes to being evil.
