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People are scared shitless around him - but it’s fear without respect’ Putin is 70. Meduza’s sources say his ‘power vertical’ is ‘collapsing.’
[...]
According to the sources,
Russian elites’ feelings towards Putin soured after his decision to raise the country’s pension age in 2018 - a move a majority of Russians opposed.
[...]
In more recent years, the situation has only gotten worse. According to Meduza’s sources,
Putin has gradually stopped warning the ministers of his plans both for the short term and the long term.“Up until recently, the [ministers] would at least serve as a kind of Google for the president. He would voice scenarios that he thought were likely and ask, ‘What if we do this? What will the consequences be? And what if we do it this way? Then what?’ But that’s stopped,” said a source close to the government.
According to the source, after the start of the pandemic, Putin (who’s
known to worry obsessively about his health)
stopped consulting the ministers altogether - and limited his decision-making process to brief discussions with his “inner circle” [...] “[Since the start of the pandemic,] things have repeatedly gotten dumped on our heads with no warning,” one source told Meduza. [...] “The president is liable to declare things [like that] with no warning. Grand gestures, so to speak.
And then the feverish search [for money to pay for the measures] begins,” one high-ranking source told Meduza.
According to him,
until a few years ago, Putin’s process was almost the exact opposite: first he would listen to proposals from various government agencies, then he would choose the one he thought was best.
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Other sources close to the government added that
this fear, in combination with Putin’s aversion to hearing about problems from his subordinates, has led officials to start significantly embellishing the facts in their reports to the president. Few people, if anyone, have been willing to tell him about the true consequences of Western sanctions or the Russian economy, for example.
“Every 48 hours, there's another dumpster fire - nobody really understands what's going on. The people responsible for actually implementing decisions don’t hear about them until the last minute,” a source close to the Kremlin told Meduza.
[...]
Sources close to the Kremlin, as well as a source who knows members of Putin’s inner circle, noted that
the president is “unable to give an image of the future” to even the highest-level officials and top businessmen: “These people are suffering because of sanctions; they’re losing huge amounts of money. But it’s completely unclear to them whether the Kremlin will be able to compensate for it all.” As a result, Meduza’s sources said, Russia’s “power vertical” is starting to “collapse.” Russia’s governors, for example, have begun openly
declaring that they have no money to fulfill Moscow’s promises
[...]
Several high-ranking sources told Meduza that the combination of Putin’s recent statements about nuclear war and the Ukrainian military’s success at the front has made them nervous.
“He doesn't know how to lose,” said one. “And he especially doesn’t know how to admit he’s losing.”Ich kann mir vorstellen wie das heutzutage funktioniert: Der FSB hat die Planungsaufgaben praktisch aller (!) Ministerien übernommen und ist jetzt sozusagen ein übermächtiges Kanzleramt.