CIA chief says Putin is 'entirely too healthy'

CIA director Bill Burns gave an unusually candid assessment this week, when he told attendees at the Aspen Institute's annual security conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "entirely too healthy".

Burns was careful to qualify apparently tongue-in-cheek remarks, saying they didn't constitute "a formal intelligence judgment."

But asked directly if Putin was unhealthy or unstable, he said: "There are lots of rumours about President Putin's health and as far as we can tell, he's entirely too healthy".

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So what are we to make of speculation about Putin's health? These rumours are nothing new.

His body language, speech and gait have all been relentlessly scrutinised. And every time Putin disappears from public view for a few days — or even makes a slight misstep, such as he did recently after touching down in Tehran — it can set off a round of intense, tabloid-style speculation about his physical wellbeing.

That's the nature of Putinism, a sort of post-modern dictatorship built around one man. The Kremlin has worked hard to create an aura around Putin as the country's sole problem-solver: He hosts an annual call-in show where he literally takes on the role of pothole-fixer-in-chief.

And over the course of two decades, he has consolidated power, building a system that is driven by the whims and fixations of one person (obvious case in point: the invasion of Ukraine).

The Kremlin routinely ridicules any speculation about Putin's health; on Thursday, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin felt "fine" and in "good health" before describing speculation to the contrary as "nothing but hoaxes."

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But Burns' statement, even if made in jest, perhaps tells us a lot more about Western policymakers than it does about Putin's fitness.

For starters, it reflects a strong element of wishful thinking when it comes to the Kremlin leader. It suggests that the most worrying international crises might simply evaporate if one person — Putin — disappears from the world scene.

And that's a potential misreading of Russia. To be sure, the decision to invade Ukraine came down to one person: The Russian president, who seems to be driven by his own warped reading of history and a dose of imperial ambition.

And Russia's confrontation with the West has been driven for years by the personal grievances of a person who famously lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it's naive to hope that Putinism might not live on without Putin.

Nearly half a year after the invasion, Putin's heavy battlefield losses have not sparked, say, widespread draft resistance.

The Russian population — with the exception of thousands who have been arrested in anti-war protests — has more or less passively accepted the economic pain of new sanctions imposed on their country.

Putin's ratings, if the findings of state-run pollster WCIOM are to be believed, have actually gone up since the February 24 invasion.

The CIA director's remarks, in context, reflect how challenging it is to understand Putin, someone whose decision-making processes are opaque to the outside world.

Source: https://ift.tt/WTwHj1Q