Putin at 70: isolated, irrational and fearing for his health
There seems little for the president to celebrate on Friday as Russia’s elite dares to ask: is he losing control?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-at-seventy-age-birthday-health-state-of-mind-j0ffh37z7
Putin at 70: isolated, irrational and fearing for his health
There seems little for the president to celebrate on Friday as Russia’s elite dares to ask: is he losing control?
UK Times Archived-— https://archive.ph/MYAPd
There was a time when Vladimir Putin would have celebrated his birthday by heading into the wilderness of the Siberian taiga with an old comrade, Sergei Shoigu, for a spot of fishing. Tomorrow, however, as he turns 70, there seems little chance of him palling up with his loyal defence minister. Not while the Russian army collapses in Ukraine. Not as hardliners grow ever more furious at the army’s failures on the front line and call for Shoigu’s scalp.
After spending almost three years in near-total isolation at his residences in Moscow and Sochi, Putin, who is divorced, with an unknown number of children from one former wife and at least two lovers, is more likely to see in his 71st year with his nose in a book, perhaps by Ivan Ilyin, a 20th-century ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher who once described fascism as a “healthy, necessary and inevitable phenomenon”.
Of late he appears to have been rereading Ilyin as he obsesses over Ukraine, the West and his own legacy. Ilyin, who believed that the Russian people should “unconditionally love and unconditionally trust” their leader, was cited by Putin during a speech to announce the annexation of four regions of Ukraine. Russia’s “spirit is my spirit”, Putin said. “Its fate is my fate, its suffering is my sorrow, its flourishing is my joy.”
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