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Well, if the guy isn’t “disappeared” within the next 48 hours, I think we can assume that Vlad is okay with the rhetoric.

You attribute far more power to Putin than is perhaps warranted, at least according to this 2019 article:

Ekaterina Schulmann is a political scientist in Moscow and a member of Mr. Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights who challenged the president over the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the December meeting in the Kremlin. She said Mr. Putin’s grip on the country had been vastly exaggerated by both supporters and opponents.

“This is not a personally run empire but a huge and difficult-to-manage bureaucratic machine with its own internal rules and principles,” she said. “It happens time and again that the president says something, and then nothing or the opposite happens.”

A plethora of bureaucratic and political forces both reinforce and sap the president’s power: the security services, the Russian Orthodox Church, billionaire oligarchs, local officials and others, each with its own sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping interests. Mr. Putin has to manage them as best he can, but he doesn’t control everything they each do.

One analyst is even more blunt about Mr. Putin and the state he presides over. “The system is dysfunctional,” said Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research organization in London. “No one man could possibly control everything.”

To most Westerners, accustomed to seeing Mr. Putin strutting in front of TV cameras and projecting an aura of effortless command, such statements can sound incredible. It is true that in high-prestige matters of state, like hosting the Olympic Games or the World Cup soccer tournament, or building a bridge to Crimea, Mr. Putin has made the system act on his commands. The same is true for matters that ensure his grip on power, like cracking down on disobedient oligarchs and political opponents.

And after he came to power at the end of 1999, he effectively curbed the conspicuous disorder and noisy infighting that under his frequently drunk predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, left Russia with a state that barely functioned.

But many projects he has backed, like a critical bridge over the Amur River between Russia and China, and a high-profile undertaking to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, have stalled.

There are limits to just how much time and political capital Mr. Putin can invest in prodding corrupt or incompetent officials and contractors to do as they are told.

The construction of a new rocket launch center in the Russian Far East, pushed by Mr. Putin as “one of modern Russia’s biggest and most ambitious projects,” is taking years longer than planned, slowed by corruption, strikes by unpaid workers and other setbacks. The prosecutor general’s office in Moscow says that more than $150 million has been stolen from the project, which it said had been marred by 17,000 legal violations by more than 1,000 people.

This stark mismatch between Mr. Putin’s words and the system’s actions was on display again last month when the police in Moscow arrested Michael Calvey, the American founder of one of the oldest and biggest Russia-focused investment funds, on fraud charges after a dispute with a rival over control of a Russian bank.

Mr. Calvey’s arrest, on charges that could result in up to 10 years in prison, was at odds with repeated statements by Mr. Putin that Russia must attract foreign investors and keep law-enforcement agencies from meddling in business disputes.

Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, insisted that Mr. Putin had no prior knowledge of Mr. Calvey’s detention, but no one outside the president’s innermost circle can be sure.

Aleksei Kudrin, a liberal-minded old friend of Mr. Putin’s from St. Petersburg and his former finance minister, complained that the arrest “fully disregards the directives of the president” and had created an “emergency for the economy.”

Mr. Kudrin’s observation drew widespread scorn. Critics of Mr. Putin accused the former minister of deluding himself with the idea that the president was not responsible for Mr. Calvey’s troubles and countless other examples of Russian law enforcement run amok.

Some recalled how at the height of murderous purges in the 1930s, many of Stalin’s acolytes refused to believe that the Soviet dictator knew what was going on — which he clearly did, since he signed off on lists of people to be executed — and blamed out-of-control underlings.

But Russia today, Ms. Schulmann said, resembles not so much the rigidly regimented country ruled by Stalin as the dilapidated autocracy of Russia in the early 19th century. The ruler at the time, Czar Nicholas I, presided over corrupt civilian and military bureaucracies that expanded Russian territory, led the country into a disastrous war in Crimea and drove the economy into a stagnant dead end.

Nicholas knew the limits of his power: “It is not I who rule Russia,” he complained. “It is the 30,000 clerks.” The only real difference now, Ms. Schulmann said, is that “clerks,” or bureaucrats, now number over a million and a half.

“It is a great illusion that you just need to reach the leader and make him listen and everything will change,” she added. “This is not how it happens.”

The illusion, however, is largely a result of the Kremlin’s own propaganda about the man at the top of what it calls the “power vertical.”