There has been a lot of recent discussion that Putin might be gravely ill.
I think the evidence on this is scant, but let’s humor the idea for a moment.
The best piece of evidence comes from an April 21 meeting.
That’s Putin on the left obviously.
On the right is defense minister Sergei Shoigu.
The two are good friends, so there is no reason to think the situation should be especially
tense for Putin.
This was supposed to be a standard working meeting on issues with the war.
Nothing too serious.
The video you are watching is an official release from the Kremlin.
I want you to take a look at Putin’s right hand.
See how he’s gripping the table?
It’s not particularly unnatural right now.
But six minutes into the meeting, he starts taking a vice grip, with the web of his fingers
all the way against it.
To isolate what’s happening here, this is the best quality photo that the Kremlin released.
Let’s go ahead and zoom in on it.
I don’t know about you, but I think this is a weird way to grab a table.
I’d suggest trying it yourself for the remainder of this video.
I have done it for an extended period of time and thought it was uncomfortable, especially
with the elbow pressed in against the body.
In any case, this vice grip continues until the end of the video: that’s at least another
six minutes.
The video just cuts off at that point.
There is also an odd foot tap, which indicates that either Putin likes to fidget or he has
some sort of uncontrollable tremble.
Some also think he looks bloated in this video, which is consistent with taking steroids,
but there could be any number of other reasons for that.
Then there’s this video from February 21 Security Council meeting.
The clip is short, which is why I have it paused.
I want you to take a look at his right side as we play it.
It seems like he is dropping down further on his right foot, as though he is limping.
Or at least I think so.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Summing up, though, in terms of evidence-ish,
we have holding a table, tapping the, being bloated, and a limping.
A couple with big maybe caveats there.
The rest of the “evidence” is hardly evidence at all.
Some point to the remote work he frequently does as being the result of concerns about
covid and comorbidities.
Putin is taking tons of meetings digitally.
In fact,
these previous four photos are from the four most recent news updates with images from
the Kremlin’s website at the time of production.
When Putin is in person, he is often sitting at extreme social distance.
This is the non-Putin crowd at that Security Council meeting from a moment ago, where he
was limping.
There is no wide shot from that recording, but here is the best recreation of the meeting
that I can make.
Tons of space between himself and everyone else.
And you will also remember these famously long tables Putin has sat at with world leaders.
But it is also perfectly reasonable to just see this as a 69 year old man worried about
getting covid and dying.
Then there is the blanket incident from the May 9 Victory Day parade.
The empty seat here is Putin’s, and you can see a dark blue coat and a green blanket
on it.
During the parade, he had the blanket on his lap.
Some people made a big deal out of this because the weather that day was allegedly temperate,
and its real purpose was to hide more trembles.
But if you spend even another moment looking at this still from the television broadcast,
you can see a bunch of others with the same blanket.
This guy even has a blanket inside of a heavy jacket.
And there are a whole lot more if you zoom out further on the stage.
This is the same group at a different angle from the television broadcast.
These people are a separate group to Putin’s left or our right, and it’s more of the
same.
Here Putin is shaking this guy’s hand, probably telling him he has a nice blanket.
Overall, I count at least nineteen blankets.
I think people just got cold.
And while it is true that the others with blankets tend to be on the older side, but
Putin is also kind of old.
Now, a conspiracy theorist might tell you that the others holding blankets is just a
ruse.
But this photo is actually from last year’s parade, and we have the same blankets.
And here are more people getting cold in 2017.
The blankets are red and not green, but it’s the same story.
Moving on, Ukrainian intelligence chief Cyril Budanov has repeated in interviews that Putin
is gravely ill.
But a good rule of thumb in the world of security—especially when states are at war—is to ignore what
anyone says.
Talk is cheap, and who knows what the ulterior motive here could be.
Finally, some have pointed out that Putin has a doctor trailing him at all times, as
if he is worried that he might collapse at some point.
But I ask you: if you were a very powerful 69 year old man at constant risk of assassination
attempts, wouldn’t you have a doctor shadow you, regardless of other possible health complications?
To wit, in the United States, the White House Medical Unit has more than 20 full time staff,
including five physicians, and one on duty at all times.
And before you say that this is because Biden as a 79 year old is at an even greater health
risk than Putin,
keep in mind these numbers date back to the W. Bush and Obama administrations.
In sum, many are treating Putin’s illness as obvious: that he has cancer, Parkinson’s
or something else.
I am not that kind of doctor, but the actual evidence seems scant:
Putin may appear to be in discomfort.
But otherwise, he is engaging in fairly normal behaviors.
And almost all of this is coming from media that the Kremlin is allowing Western intelligence
to freely look at.
If there truly were a problem, you’d think they would be better at hiding it.
Regardless, Putin is still a 69 year old man.
That’s not that old, but it’s plausible he is sick.
Thus, for the rest of this video, let’s take a leap of faith.
Suppose Putin is deathly ill—emphasis on this being a hypothetical.
What does that mean for the war?
To begin, pure irrationality would help explain why the war started in the first place.
One simple take on this is that Putin has developed some sort of neurological condition.
After years of acquiring a reputation as a cold, calculating, and strategic individual,
his illness has turned him into an irrational madman incapable of seeing the folly that
will be this war.
But as we have discussed in a previous video, I do not think this is a good match for what
we have seen.
In short, the war has been very popular at home.
Whatever strategic problems have arisen in the war can easily be blamed on the bad intelligence
Putin’s military advisors fed him during the lead-up to the war.
The purges to the FSB—Russia’s successor organization to the KGB—corroborate that
theory.
Put differently, “rational” does not mean “perfect”, and I think we are seeing that
principle in action.
But a Putin illness would make sense of a couple other features of the war, which takes
us to the next topic of discussion: truncated punishment.
Autocratic leaders have interesting incentives on when to fight.
If they are secure domestically, they have less incentive to start wars than democratic
countries.
After all, autocratic leaders can more easily extract profits from their position.
A war risks a disastrous failure and coup opportunities.
Given that, why ruin a good thing?
And for Vladimir Putin, it is a very good thing.
By traditional measures, the richest people in the world are Elon Musk at 219 billion
dollars and Jeff Bezos at 171 billion.
According to some estimates, Putin has amassed 200 billion, siphoning off money from one
of the world’s largest oil-producing states.
Imagine that, in January 2022, the political climate in Moscow was full of coup risks.
Then a diversionary war in Ukraine to enjoy a rally round the flag effect and distract
the would-be military plotters would make sense regardless of Putin’s health.
However, if everything was smooth sailing, then a perfectly healthy Putin going on an
adventure does not make sense.
But a sick Putin?
Well, that is starting to make sense.
Perhaps Putin sees the capture of Ukraine as what would allow him to develop a legacy
as Russia’s greatest ruler in history.
Maybe one day he too can have a Wikipedia page just on his statues.
That might not be worth risking your death over.
But if you were about to die anyway, then there really isn’t any risk there at all.
And that personal glamour benefit is the type of thing that can override the incentive to
avoid war due to the costs and risks that come along with it.
The other way Putin’s possible illness would help explain the cause of the war is a mechanism
known as “stalling”,
which I happen to know something about.
Let’s go to the lines-on-maps to visualize the problem.
When thinking about basic crisis bargaining incentives, we begin by calculating the expected
division of the good at stake if a war were fought to a complete military conclusion.
Imagine this white line reflects that that division.
Everything to the northwest stays Ukraine; everything to the southeast becomes Russia.
War is costly, though, and we can represent Ukraine’s cost with this yellow line.
The space between the yellow and white lines is the cost of lost soldiers, destroyed property,
and so forth converted to square kilometers of territory.
As such, Ukraine needs a border at least to the yellow line to be satisfied.
We can do the same thing for Russia’s cost using this red line.
Analogous to before, Russia needs a border at least to the red line to be satisfied.
Therefore, any division between the yellow and red lines is mutually preferable to war.
Unfortunately, this simple model ignores the temporal dynamics that occur within a war.
Indeed, by merely starting and continuing a war, it may be possible for one actor to
temporarily capture some prize.
The easiest way to see with civil conflicts.
For example, think about the Tamil Tigers during the Sri Lankan Civil War.
As long as the war continued, they could basically run a de facto state, with a government, a
central bank, and court system.
It took the Sri Lankan government 25 years to finally end the conflict.
With the war today, Russia has shifted the mid-war status quo to seal the land bridge
surrounding the Sea of Azov.
And that’s something that Russia likes and Ukraine hates in the here and now.
But that division might not match what will happen over the long term.
Imagine for a moment that holding the Sea of Azov is unsustainable.
Perhaps eventually Ukraine will fully mobilize its population and exploit mass quantities
of equipment coming in from Western partners.
Visually, the division looks something like this as long as the war is ongoing.
But maybe the eventual expectation is a division that looks like this.
When two countries value the present and the future in similar ways, this distinction does
not matter.
The parties can improve over fighting a war by splitting the territory that in a way that
averages these two time periods.
Let’s call that the time-adjusted equivalent.
If the countries are more present-minded, then the in-war division matters more, and
so the bargain more closely matches that war-time split.
If the countries are more future-minded, then the opposite is true, and so the bargain has
to more closely match the ultimate war outcome.
Unfortunately, peace breaks down when there is a specific asymmetry in time preferences.
Imagine that Ukraine cares more about the future than Russia does—
say, because the Russian leader will be dead in two years.
Satisfying Russia requires closely matching the in-war division.
Satisfying Ukraine requires closely matching the expected post-war division.
That’s because those are the time periods that the respective actors care more about.
Even when factoring costs of war, if the in-war and post-war divisions are sufficiently different,
and the more patient country does better in the long-term, no deal is mutually satisfactory.
Again, I think this is a reasonable explanation of what we have seen so far, even if the opening
premise of Putin’s illness is unlikely.
The next point worth discussing is the coup incentives inside of Russia.
It is unclear how this breaks.
Coups are about coordinating the necessary group of political power players on agreeing
to remove the leader in question.
In that sense, a physical disability has little direct effect on coup prospects.
Unless Putin is actually trying to run away from the plotters, that part doesn’t really
matter.
A more exhausted Putin, on the other hand, might have a hard time putting sufficient
hours in the day to properly look out for coup plotters and manager the war.
That would make a coup more likely.
But there is a countervailing effect here as well.
Imagine you were a Russian power player who knew that Putin was dying.
You have two choices: act now or sit and wait.
Acting now is risky.
As mentioned earlier, Putin is popular.
A successful coup would have to convince the Russian population of its merits, which is
a challenge.
If you sit and wait, you can spend the time manipulating those around you to ensure that
you will emerge as the leader following Putin’s death.
Given that you may only be waiting a few months or year, that last option sounds much more
attractive—which actually solidifies Putin’s rule, at least in the short term.
As a quick final point, we should talk about leadership turnover.
Whoever might replace Putin after his death would not have the same need to continue the
war because they would no longer have their political fate be determined by its outcome.
That would make it easier for the new leader to pull Russian troops out—assuming that
leader does not also like the war.
But that’s a big assumption.
The easier problem to solve is a realignment of time preferences.
Once the new leader has a longer time horizon, it corrects for the imbalance and resolves
the stalling problem.
And that’s it: how the sun setting on Putin’s life would affect the war.
Is your hand still holding onto the table in front of you?
If so, let me know how it feels in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this video, please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next
time for some more lines on maps.
Take care.