Persistent rumors of Putin's death evoke a nonchalant international reaction

For months, rumors have swirled about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the heart of all the rumors is a key question.

Is he still alive?

A claim by a mysterious Russian Telegram channel called General SVR, run by a prominent Russian political analyst, sparked a cascade of international news and social media posts in October 2023.

According to the channel, Putin suffered a cardiac arrest and died on Thursday, October 26 at 20:42.

Valery Solovei, widely known for his criticism of the Kremlin, is believed to be the SVR general. He predicted many events that never came to pass. But he found a big one on August 1, 2016. He said Sergei Ivanov, Vladimir Putin's longtime friend and chief of staff, was fired and replaced by Anton Vaino.

Eleven days later it was done. Today, Vaino remains Putin's chief of staff.

Given the sketchy history of General SVRs, the Western media has been scrambling, with inconclusive results for months trying to determine whether this current, unbelievable tale is true.

Western intelligence sources tell WTOP the events mentioned in the posts are probably not true. And while there may be a grain of truth in the stories about Putin's illness, there is no way to consider the dark layers of security around Putin to determine the truth.

Living in the age of artificial intelligence and deep forgeries, it is not difficult to imagine the complexity involved in producing evidence of Putin's physical status.

But the most amazing element of this story, which adds to the mystery, is that prominent officials say it really doesn't matter whether he's alive or not he did what he set out to do.

Optics: It doesn't matter who Putin is

I don't care if he is dead or alive,” said Eeva Eek-Pajuste, a police adviser at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Emphasizing that her comments are my opinions and not those of the ministry,” she said everything about optics.

If Putin's legacy is alive and he appears to be alive in public, then it makes no difference whether it's this Putin or another Putin that people see, Eek-Pajuste said.

Putin's 24 years in power have been dominated by long prison terms for Kremlin critics, brutal assassinations of political opponents and a gradually declining global economic profile for Russia. His rhetoric demonizing Western nations, NATO and neighbors who support Western values ​​are seen as part of a possible strategy to rebuild the Soviet Union.

The most egregious example of his alleged plan has been the two-year war against Ukraine, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and almost half a million Russian troops.

Putin, who on March 18 secured a fifth term as president, is often blamed for everything that happens in Russia because of his iron-fisted grip on power.

Thus, reports of his death may, for some, signal an end to the era of fear he presided over.

But Eek-Pajuste, who has a long and distinguished history with the Estonian government, suggested that this is far from the truth. She said Putin may simply be the avatar of a much larger Russian entity that represents, to the dismay of Western Putin critics, the very complex reality of life inside Russia.

Russian democracy versus Western democracy

Democracy means something completely different to Russians than it does to those living in Western countries, Eek-Pajuste said.

For Russians,” she said, democracy is the terrible time in the early 1990s when there were no rules for money and life in Russia was close to anarchy.

In 1991, post-USSR Russia lost the 45-year Cold War with the West, which protected democracy, catapulted into a period similar to the Golden Rush in the American West in the mid-1800s.

It was a free for all.

Russia was engulfed by government power grabs, waves of theft and murder, the privatization of industry, the emergence of renewed and powerful espionage agencies, and the rise of a new president with deep KGB roots.

Putin managed to melt all the chaos into a machine that increased his wealth from that of a mid-level government official to a figure estimated to be close to $250 billion.

This machine, according to a top Ukrainian military adviser, is as much to blame for the Kremlin's activities as Putin.

Putin is not all of Russia, OK, said Yuriy Sak, adviser to Ukraine's minister for strategic industries.

“It's not really accurate to blame everything that's happening on Putin alone and to think that whether Putin goes or stays will have any significant impact.

Sak gave the last election as an example.

Russia is a terrorist state because 87% of their population apparently voted for it, supporting terrorism, which makes them complicit in terrorism as well,” Sak said.

He said that regardless of whether the rumors are true or not, Russians who support Putin also bear the blame for the state of the country and his actions abroad.

If Putin goes tomorrow if he dies or is abducted by aliens, there will still be millions and millions of Russians who are war criminals in their hearts and minds, Sak said.

The implicit claim that Putin is dead and being replaced by his ilk has generated such a response within Russia that the government has been forced to address it. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's chief spokesman, called the death rumors an absurd false information.

But in Russia, where disinformation thrives and is even used by the Kremlin to achieve its domestic and geopolitical goals, according to US intelligence agencies, even the Kremlin's denial of Putin's death is suspect.

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