Quote (Skinned @ 8 Mar 2022 23:27)
I think Putin has cancer or something similar. He has been making incremental and tactical gains in a calculated way for twenty years as a sovereign and is doing something so out of his character I think he was given a terminal diagnosis, which is why he looks so bad. He looks so inflamed in any of his pics lately, and that is even under a small animal's worth of makeup.
He doesn't look like a healthy person right now.
Believe me or not, I've been having similar thoughts over the past two weeks. Putin's reputation was built on the fact that he always seemed to think one step ahead, always have an ace up his sleeve, constantly take meticulously calculated risks and be successful with it.
This recent episode, however, is so uncharacteristic. There is no concrete action or recent event that justifies this invasion. When he annexed Crimea and created a frozen conflict in Eastern Ukraine, he had already achieved the vast majority of his geostrategic goals in Ukraine. Both operations were carefully planned and executed flawlessly. There was a clear rationale behind his actions - even if they violated international law and couldn't be condoned by the West, every savvy realpolitician understood why he did that.
Fast forward to two weeks ago: Putin either badly miscalculated and thought that the threats of economic sanctions were just a bluff, or he thought they were coming and just didn't care. Either way, it's a bad blunder. Then we have this weird situation where the Russian army seems to have thought that they could just waltz into every Ukrainian city without resistance, or that the resistance would be so weak they could easily blitzkrieg their way to victory within a few days. Once this didn't pan out (blunder #2), it became clear that the logistics of war were not working (blunder #3). And to add insult to injury, the Russians were preparing for Western sanctions for years by having the Russian central bank amass huge reserves of foreign currency with which they could shield their economy from sanctions - only to leave the big majority of these foreign currency reserves lying around at Western banks who froze them as soon as the sanctions went into effect. (Blunder #4, and a HUUUUUGE one.)
And now they're openly threatening to go nuclear, both literally and economically (by musing about cutting off gas shipment), a card they can only play once and that will forever doom their economy. Hell, even just insinuating that they might break the contracts and cut off the gas is already undermining Western trust in its ability to rely on Russian gas.
Russia's/Putin's action of the past few weeks are full of strategic miscalculations, bad planning and botched execution. It's very uncharacteristic; which is also why I didn't believe in this invasion until the moment it actually happened. It just doesn't make sense. The only explanations I can come up with are that Putin either started losing his grip on reality... or that he's seriously ill and is willing to leave scorched earth in a desperate bid to secure his legacy as the person who reversed the, in his own words, "catastrophe of the dissolution of the Soviet Union". And yes, he does indeed look bloated and visibly aged. Russian-speaking reports also say that his recent public speeches were a lot less coherent, eloquent and sharp than the ones he used to give up until two years ago.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 8 2022 06:27pm