What’s he afraid of?

The other day I mentioned that, as Ukrainians and Russians die, Putin is cowering in an underground bunker 1,300 miles from the action.

There was another war leader who chose such secure headquarters, but he had a ready excuse: his capital was being carpet-bombed. By contrast, Moscow doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of a similar treatment. So why hide away in, or rather under, the Ural mountains?

We do know that Vlad takes excessive, sometimes comic, precautions to protect his precious person.

Thus, when he was still in the Kremlin during the Covid pandemic, every visitor had to submit his urine, faeces and blood for tests. If the results were satisfactory, he was allowed to talk to the great leader, but only across the length of a 30-foot table.

But Putin’s inordinate fear of contagion still doesn’t explain his current location. There are many secure bunkers under the Kremlin itself, and they are amply stocked with all sorts of supplies. So Covid doesn’t explain the 1,300 miles.

It’s tempting to diagnose paranoid delusions, but this temptation must be resisted for being simplistic. In treating villains like Putin, we must always proceed from two presumptions: one of evil; the other, of rationality.

The second one is less secure (we’ll never go wrong on the first), but it still must hold sway until convincingly refuted. In this case, let’s assume that Putin is hiding away for concrete reasons that to him seem valid.

This gets us back to the question in the title. What’s he afraid of? I can think of only two possibilities.

First, he justifiably regards the danger of assassination as real. One of his nearest and dearest may want to resolve the on-going disaster by slipping a little something into Vlad’s carrot juice or perhaps smearing a different something on his bed linen.

Just look at the haste with which some of Putin’s moneybags, such as Fridman and Deripaska (though not Abramovich), and even some members of his own family have tried to distance themselves from the war. They know that, however the war ends, they’ve already lost it.

Western sanctions against their little empires and them personally are jeopardising everything they’ve built, souring the fruits of their mafioso labour. Where are they going to sail their 300-foot yachts? The Volga? Lake Baikal? What use are their Western palaces if they can’t get to them? Who’s going to treat their illnesses and educate their children? Will their frozen assets ever be thawed?

Many such questions must be going through their minds, and they conceivably may decide that a little polonium in Vlad’s drink or a smear of Novichok on his napkin just may answer all of them at once.

There must also be quite a few military men of high rank who hate the way the war is going, the monstrous orders they have to issue to their troops, and the Hague War Crimes Tribunal shimmering through the air like a ghostly mirage. Such chaps may prefer a Makarov pistol as their weapon of choice, but the outcome would be the same, if faster in arriving.

Then of course some second-tier officials (Vlad himself is the one-man first tier) may feel now is the propitious moment to advance their own political ambitions. Post factum they’ll always be able to claim noble motives and pass themselves off as liberal pacifists.

Thus, Vlad’s fear of assassination would be both rational and valid. But there’s another, more cataclysmic, possibility.

Putin may be seriously considering a nuclear first strike against Western targets, possibly cities. It’s the old banging-the-door-on-the-way-out syndrome.

In that case, a retaliatory second strike would definitely take out Moscow, and no underground bunker would be safe enough. The Urals offer more reliable protection, and Vlad wouldn’t want that proverbial door to bounce back into his face.

One possibility I’m discounting is his fear of a popular uprising. I’m sure the images of Gaddafi being first buggered with a bayonet and then shot have flashed so vivid in Vlad’s mind that he has taken every possible precaution against such an eventuality.

The moment demonstrators graduate from chanting “Putin is a dickhead” (Putin khuylo, for the students of Russian among you) to physical action, the dickhead’s stormtroopers have the orders to fire at will, no doubt about that.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching videos of Vlad over the past few days, and a sinister, sadistic smile never seems to leave his Botoxed mug. He seems to be enjoying himself, as if the carnage crowned his life’s work as its apotheosis.

One day such images will adorn entries for EVIL in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. For the time being they serve as icons before which Western quislings are kneeling.

One day, I pray, they’ll join Putin in the dock as his accomplices. And they stand warned: so far God has been generous in answering my prayers.