Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has been missing from public for over a week.
MOSCOW — Where’s Putin?
The question obsessed Moscow and much of Russia on Friday, as
speculation mounted as to why President Vladimir V. Putin had not been
seen in public for more than a week.
He abruptly canceled a trip to Kazakhstan and postponed a treaty
signing with representatives from South Ossetia who were reportedly told
not to bother to fly to Moscow. Most unusually, he was absent from an
annual meeting of the top officials from the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic
intelligence service.
The rumor mill went into overdrive, churning out possible
explanations from the simple to the salacious to the sinister. He had
been stricken by the particularly devastating strain of flu going around
Moscow just now. He sneaked off to Switzerland for the birth of his
love child. He had a stroke. The victim of a palace coup, he was
imprisoned within the Kremlin. He was dead, aged 62.
Dmitry S. Peskov, the presidential spokesman, treated all the health
questions with a certain wry humor initially, coming up with new and
inventive ways to say, “He’s fine.”
Yet, the fact that the story proved impossible to quash underscored
the uneasy mood gripping the Russian capital for months now, an
atmosphere in which speculation about the health of just one man can
provoke fears about death and succession.
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