Putin: Isolated, paranoid, and possibly unwell
Vladimir Putin was confident of capturing Kyiv “at lightning speed,” said Nataliya Vasilyeva in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). With his invasion faltering, the Russian leader is now “turning on his own spy chiefs and military advisers,” according to U.S. intelligence reports that paint him as increasingly isolated and paranoid. Putin has reportedly fired several top generals who misled him about “how poorly his campaign in Ukraine is going.” When he promised Russian mothers their conscript sons were safe, for example, he was genuinely unaware that they were being sent to the front lines as “cannon fodder.” The pandemic may explain why Putin “made such a strategic mistake,” said Marie Mendras in Le Monde (France). Putin lived in near isolation for nearly two years and was separated from most of his advisers. During this time, his typical mistrust of those around him “turned into exaggerated suspicion,” and he began planning his invasion of Ukraine without input from his own military men. Commanders are now “overwhelmed” by their losses, and the elites who long supported Putin are appalled.
There’s growing evidence that the man is ill, said Mikhail Rubin in Proekt (Russia, operating in exile). Putin, who turns 70 in October, looks bloated and puffy and is “accompanied by a huge team of doctors”—nine on average—when he travels between Moscow and his palace complex in Sochi. Hospital contracts show that several doctors from Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital were flown to Putin in Sochi between 2016 and 2021. One of them, Yevgeny Selivanov, a surgeon specializing in cancer and thyroid problems, has visited Putin 35 times and spent 166 days with him, including during some of his mysterious absences. Putin has long had an interest in alternative medicine, and has indulged in the Central Asian folk remedy of bathing in the antler blood of Siberian red deer. But lately, he has favored conventional treatments—and that has led to endless chatter in the Russian medical community about “the president’s health problems.”
It’s not just his health that Putin has been lying about, said Agnieszka Bryc in Polityka (Poland). Disinformation is the former KGB spy’s way of life, which is why the West can’t possibly believe any assurances Russia makes in peace talks with Ukraine. The lying backfired on Putin when advisers “believed their own propaganda” and assured the Russian leader that the war would be over in three days and “the locals would greet the Russians with flowers like liberators.” But masses of soldiers’ corpses can’t be fibbed away, and the beleaguered army has discovered the truth. That’s why Putin’s military has shed all discipline, said Mark Galeotti in the Moscow Times (Russia). Mass graves and other evidence in the Ukrainian town of Bucha show that Russian soldiers raped and executed civilians and looted whatever they could carry. None of them expected months of grinding warfare, and many feel “abandoned by their commanders” as they run low on food and fuel, “stranded in hostile territory.” Their “bestial” behavior is “symptomatic of an army that already suspects it has lost.”