Again, if this were true, it would be a clear sign of literal insanity.
With an ordinary person, you or me, this would be like our taking all our money out to some huge National Park and burying it in a different place every day because we know we’re always going to remember where it is, and we’re always going to be physically able to retrieve it, and we’re never going to die, so the money will always remain available and safe. Someone points out the obvious flaws in this scheme, and our response is “Makes sense to me, and it;s always worked so far.” The inability to see further ahead than the next step is a sign of some severe disfunctionality.
Yes, and it’s completely irrational. The difference is that, for the vast majority of us, it’s a source of comfort that doesn’t have much of an effect on anyone else, so we may indulge ourselves in it. In a world leader, it’s a dangerous delusion that his closest aides would be constantly pointing to him (until enough of them get shipped off to the Gulag, anyway).
All indications are that his vision for Russia is a USSR successor state with a core of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, ringed by former Soviet states as non-NATO buffers.
This is his “retirement plan”. In his mind, this is what buys the glory and power required to let him die in peace surrounded by admirers (or at least protectors). If he doesn’t achieve it, he ends up being humiliated and killed. His only remaining concern in life is getting on the right side of this dilemma. If any personal successor has been named, it’s not with a view to Russia’s future; it will be strictly instrumental to the politics of keeping himself in power.
As to the future after his death, whether he succeeds or fails, the details are someone else’s problem. It seems like the only future he’s concerned with is maximizing his personal peace and comfort in the last 10-20 years of his life, and to hell with whoever needs to die to serve that aim.
Should Putin fall, rather than die of natural causes, I’d expect him to be replaced by a technocrat. Mikhail Mishustin could be a possibility, although he’s got ties that could be viewed as corrupt. Aleksei Mozhin, a member of the IMF Executive Board would be another possible candidate, although he also might be viewed as having too many ties to the current Russian regime.
He couldn’t care less what happens to this mega-state long term. He thinks the breakup of the USSR was a tragedy for Russia and wants to be remembered as the person who reunited “greater/historic Russia”. What happens afterwards is not likely to affect how he is remembered.
You are telling current and future dictators to never surrender. Even more temperate proposals to try Putin, or dictators in the Horn of Africa, and then punish them, are a reason for them to never quit.
Nuremberg trials? They likely are on Putin’s mind right now, and are a reason he’ll resist surrendering, even though he continues to be losing this war.
I am saying no such thing. I’m not referring at all to any action by an outside adversary. I am referring to the Russian tradition of the military or the secret police or some other entrenched source of power bumping off a leader who has gotten too far ahead of themselves and put Mother Russia at risk in the process. The more savagely Putin scours through his shrinking circle of loyalists looking for scapegoats, the more likely it becomes those minions adjust their calculus on the price of loyalty, and invite him for tea on a high balcony with an inadequate railing.
If it gets that far, nothing so crude: someone in the FSB could arrange a nice cup of polonium/thallium/novichok tea while holidaying at Idokopas, or somewhere else well isolated from Moscow.
But the recent videos show him looking very puffy, to my eyes. Is he already ill with something, or just hitting the bottle too often?
I liken him more to Tony Soprano. He’s eliminated all of his political opposition; he’s got Lukashenko under his thumb; once he gets Ukraine and then maybe Moldova and the Baltic States under his thumb he can appoint a tame ‘successor’ who will follow his orders remotely while he ‘retires’ to his US$1.4B compound on the Black Sea.
Putin is not thinking past his own existence, and that he is not is not of itself an indication of mental illness. In general, I’m not enthusiastic about people who think they can delve the inner machinations of Putin’s psyche, and especially people who have absolutely no context Russian culture.
I wonder if Putin is exploring life extension technology that could increase his life span by years or decades. He is actually in a better position to invest in these technologies than almost anyone else. He possibly has a personal fortune greater than anyone else in the world and also seems in almost complete control of the government with even fewer structural constraints than Xi Xinping. At the same time compared to most other dictatorships Russia still has a reasonably sophisticated scientific establishment. If Putin wanted to invest in a Manhattan-project scale effort devoted solely to extending his own life he could probably do it.
That’s the conclusion this Vox article reaches as well; that Putin has done an extremely good job of divding up the military and security services, making a military coup difficult, and that the repression on the average citizen’s ability to protest or contribute to political change is almost nil.
)