Hardly a day passes without fresh speculation about the health and welfare of the Russian leader. Putin has blood cancer; he has thyroid cancer; he has a brain tumor. He has Parkinson’s disease or early-stage dementia.
The symptoms? He doesn’t walk normally — or at least not the way he used to. He behaves irrationally and appears disoriented. His face is puffy; his posture isn’t right. He has hand and leg tremors. He disappears from public view.
A Telegram channel run by a former Russian foreign intelligence officer said Putin will soon undergo cancer surgery — the report goes so far as to identify the official who will stand in for Putin during the operation. A study prepared for the State Department more than a decade ago resurfaces; according to its author, Putin has Asperger’s Syndrome.
Noteworthy names have joined the conversation. Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6 — the British spy service — said the “best explanation” is that Putin has Parkinson’s disease. The economist Anders Aslund tweeted that Putin had undergone surgery in mid-May; “rumors claim that it was abdomen cancer.” Three days into the war, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said Putin “was always calculating and cold, but this is different. He seems erratic.” Boris Karpichkov, an ex-KGB counterintelligence officer who defected to Britain, diagnosed a cocktail of maladies — Parkinson’s disease, dementia and “numerous” other ailments. “He is — or at least acts — insane and obsessed by paranoid ideas,” Karpichkov told the Sun.
Diagnosing Putin is obviously more than a matter of curiosity; a correct assessment might help the world better anticipate his next moves in Ukraine and inform its response.
It’s also an area in which respected physicians and psychologists tread carefully, for the simple reason that they cannot examine the patient in person.
“I think something is going on from the medical perspective,” Les Pyenson, who led the CIA’s” leadership analysis” department for 15 years, told Grid. “Something is wrong with him — but I don’t know exactly what.”
