If Putin dies

or is dead. the article is about what happens next. for those that are unaware, Putin has not been seen in public in over a week...

[rquoter]Is Vladimir Putin dead?

Who knows?

What’s clear is that something has been going on in Moscow for at least a week, and whatever it is, the Kremlin prefers that it remain a secret. Russian reporters – a vastly more intrepid and courageous group than their colleagues in most countries – have been razzing Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov by alluding to Boris Yeltsin’s famous disappearances, and Peskov, usually an able front man, seems a bit wrong-footed at the moment.

Rumors abound: Putin has been removed, Putin has cancer, Putin had a stroke, Putin’s girlfriend had a baby. (On that last one, I’m not sure why Putin’s squeeze giving birth would cause him to vanish for a week; he’s not the kind of guy who seems all that concerned with paternity leave.) The hashtag “Putin has died” is trending like crazy on Russian twitter, but that means exactly zip in a country that thrives on conspiracy theories.

There are darker rumors as well: Putin is hunkering down with his high command and preparing something awful, either for the West in the form of all-out war in Ukraine, or for his own people as he goes to the mattresses as part of intra-Kremlin warfare after the shocking murder of Boris Nemtsov. Let’s not think about that until we have to.

This is one place where my expertise in Russian affairs gives me no special insight, and my guess at this point isn’t much better than anyone else’s. For what it’s worth, I don’t see the movement of personnel and forces that would signal a coup; that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but coups don’t normally take nearly two weeks to sort out, especially not when run by the rough boys of the Russian military and security services.

If I had to bet, I’d say Putin is ill, and perhaps gravely so, and the white noise coming out of the Kremlin represents a kind of holding pattern while everyone sorts out favors, bribes, threats, and all the other ugly stuff that goes with a Moscow succession.

So what happens if Putin actually dies? There are some legal and political realities to consider. None of what I’m about to say is a prediction, but rather a roadmap of possible alternatives.

First things first. There is actually a Russian constitution, and as hard as it is to believe, Putin and his gang haven’t made a habit of violating it. (They’ve worked around it and gutted the spirit of the thing, but that’s a different matter.) If Putin dies, there is a clear short-term procedure: the Russian Prime Minister becomes Acting President. There is no Russian vice-president; when Yeltsin’s veep led a coup against him, that job was flushed out of the Russian political system in the 1993 rewrite of the constitution.

Putin’s team knows this article of the constitution well, because it’s how Putin himself became Acting President in 1999 when Yeltsin resigned. In this case, executive power will fall on Dmitry Medvedev, who has already held the job during the brief break from power Putin took between 2008 and 2012. As Acting President, Medvedev can govern for 90 days while organizing new elections. There isn’t much else he can do; the Russian constitution has a built-in firewall against Acting Presidents dissolving the legislature or monkeying around with any referenda.

What’s interesting is what happens next. Who runs in the new election? Medvedev is a known quantity, he’s held the job, and he’s not unpopular. He’s also well-known in the West. (He’s the guy to whom President Obama made his infamous “flexibility” gaffe.) It’s hard to imagine who else steps up, but a lot depends on how long Putin has been ill. If this is a sudden crisis like a stroke, then there’s a lot of deal-making going on right now, including arrangements for immunity, movement of money, and a general exchange of promises about who’s not going to prosecute whom.

The default in this case will likely be Medvedev, who was definitely pushed down the ladder when Putin returned to power, but who, as Prime Minister and a former president, knows where a lot of bodies are buried and who is owed more than a few favors.

If Putin’s been ill for a while, however, and this is just the endgame of something like cancer, then it’s a different ballgame, and we can expect that those deals have already been made. Expect to see the usual suspects in the security and military forces moving some chairs around while the farce of a new election is organized according to previous arrangements. In that case, Medvedev again is the likely choice for another term, although in a weakened condition, since these deals will have been made when the Boss was alive and healthy.

Finally, if this really was a coup, then I’m having trouble figuring out who arrested whom. Did Putin finally scare the people around him so badly – with loose talk, for example, about nuclear weapons – that they’ve removed him before he gets them all killed and turns Russia into a wasteland? I find that doubtful; some of Putin’s generals are just as hard-line as Putin himself, and their genetic deference to authority will not allow them to hose the Boss just because of a piddling war in Ukraine.

If Putin was removed by people more hard-line than Putin, I’d like to know who those guys are, because “more hard-line than Putin” is pretty much synonymous with “psychopath.”

So, at this early stage, my bet is illness, perhaps a chronic condition that has now turned unexpectedly into an acute and perhaps terminal health crisis. But I don’t know, and neither does anyone else outside the walls of the Kremlin. Stay tuned.[/rquoter]

http://tomnichols.net/blog/2015/03/13/if-putin-dies/

 

As new theories emerged practically by the hour, Mr. Peskov denied them all.

A Swiss tabloid reported that Mr. Putin had spent the past week accompanying his mistress, the Olympic gymnastics medalist Alina Kabayeva, to give birth in a clinic in Switzerland’s Ticino canton favored by the family of Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister. (It would be the third child, none confirmed.)

Mr. Peskov swatted that one down, too.​

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/world/europe/russia-putin-seen-in-public.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

 

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Kremlin-controlled TV informed millions of Russians about a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and his Kyrgyz counterpart Almazbek Atambayev. Nothing unusual about that, right?

Wrong.

The meeting between the two leaders of the former Soviet republics isn’t due to take place until Monday. But that didn’t stop the newsreader on the Rossiya 24 channel reading out the following item – all in the past tense.

“The Kremlin also reports that Vladimir Putin met with Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev on Monday. They talked about cooperation in investment and humanitarian spheres, as well as the energy sector. They also discussed the possibility of Kyrgyzstan joining the Eurasian Economic Union.”

Before we get to Monday, as most of you are undoubtedly aware, we have to get past the weekend first. A spokesperson for Rossiya 24 quickly announced the news item had been a mistake. And, on a normal day, that would have been that.

But these are not normal times in Russia.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-happening-with-putin-and-russia-2015-3#ixzz3UPsefqyJ

 

Putin security chief dead.

https://twitter.com/raging545/status/577095132421455872