Putin At 70 Dead Tsar Walking...

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying tsar, Vladimir Putin turns 70 today while his brutal war against Ukraine is exploding in his puffy, currants-in-dough, steroid-addled face.

- John Sweeney

Cargo 200s Soviet slang for soldier corpses are piling up; surviving troops are voting with their feet; draftees are running for the border; their mothers and wives are protesting in the streets.

How could the man who, on February 23, stood proud as the ruler of the worlds biggest country, armed with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, owning treasure in oil and gas, whose trophies include such Cold War Two victories as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, have messed everything up so badly?

Age is just a number, they say.

Maybe, but birthdays are way stations on the path to old age.

Putin was born in 1952 when Stalin was still alive. The original monster once wrote: "I trust no one, not even myself." It is not a bad line for his successor's obituary too.

On his 10th birthday in 1962, Vladimir was pitifully thin, a waif, blond, dirt-poor, living on the wrong side of the tracks in Leningrad - now St Petersburg - killing rats.

In a rare photo of him with his very old "official" mother he looks unloved, sparking rumours that his natural mother abandoned him at a very early age. And that could explain the pitiless psychopathy of the old man today, says Jim Fallon, professor of psychiatry at the University of California.

Aged 20 in 1972, he attended Leningrad State University, and wanted to be a KGB spy, the fairytale exit out of poverty for so many clever but poor Russians.

At 30, he was in the KGB but not prospering. One assessor said Putin lacked empathy for others and his risk analysis was atrocious.

Putin turned 40 in 1992, his beloved Soviet Union tipped into the rubbish bin of history.