WHY VLADIMIR PUTIN IS UNLIKELY TO SURVIVE HIS INVASION OF UKRAINE

There is even growing speculation that his personal decision to go to war with Ukraine was as a result of being terminally ill. For Vladimir Putin it became a matter of now or never.

- JOHN DOBSON

I't was that video with I Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu last week which increased speculation that Vladimir Putin could be seriously ill. In the footage posted online by the Kremlin, the 69-year-old Putin grabs hold of the corner of the table with his right hand as soon as he sits down for the meeting, and keeps hold of it for the entirety of the 12-minute clip, as if desperate to steady himself. All the while his feet are tapping awkwardly. In fact, both men looked as if they were in poor health. Shoigu had reappeared on state media after a long absence only a few days before his meeting in the Kremlin, which prompted speculation that he had become ill or that his position had been usurped.

In contrast to Putin, who sat slightly hunched with his spine pressed flat against the back of the chair, Shoigu sat on the edge while reading his report on the situation in Mariupol with a slurred speech, suggesting that rumours of a recent heart attack could be well-founded.

Throughout the whole of his 22-year reign, Kremlin media-managers have continuously presented Vladimir Putin as a "мужик", a man with pugnacious masculinity. Recall those pictures of him riding a horse bare-chested, or salmon fishing topless in Siberia, images which have been a major part of how he brands himself to the Russian people and the world.

Now, all we have is a pastiche of Soviet gerontocracy, with Putin nodding perfunctorily, offering a grunt through his botoxed jowls to Shoigu, ordering him to seal off Ukraine's Azovstal steel plant so that "not a fly should be able to pass through".