4 ms·

That's an interesting one. It has actually been speculated that lockdowns influenced Putin to do that. https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/podcast-russia-exper

That's an interesting one. It has actually been speculated that lockdowns influenced Putin to do that. https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/podcast-russia-expert-discusses-fears-putins-madness-over-ukraine https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/podcast-russia-expert-di... "Dr Schimpfössl said Putin had been “extremely isolated” during the pandemic, with very few people allowed to see him in his “bunker”. She added: “It might well be, as bizarre as it sounds and unimaginable as it might be, that he is losing it and courting advice from people who have such fear of him that they would say what he wanted to hear.”" The invasion of Ukraine appears to have caught even Putin's generals by total surprise. It was quite clearly not well planned and Putin was over-confident to an extreme degree, i.e. he did not fully understand the situation his military was truly in. Putin is nearly 70. During COVID he became a lockdown paranoiac even by the standards of the time. As a consequence his ability to absorb information or check things for himself would have been much reduced. https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_putin-bismarck-autocrats-fear-germs/6191402.html https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_putin-bismarck-a... Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, is taking far more stringent precautions than most of his global counterparts to prevent getting the coronavirus. Kremlin spokesmen Dmitry Peskov this week confirmed that anyone wanting to see the Russian president has to walk through a futuristic "disinfection tunnel," where they're sprayed with an aerosol mist. In April, it was confirmed that anyone wanting to see Putin has to undergo a test for the virus beforehand. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/08/vladimir-putin-massive-table https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/08/vladimir-putin... "Russia’s leader is using a five-metre table for one-on-one meetings, but is it just a super-cautious Covid measure?"

munch117 4y ago
I doubt very much that anyone else had the power to impose lockdown conditions on Vladimir Putin. This kind of health paranoia is exactly what I'd expect to see in a society where there's an epidemic that is out of control: some people will take extreme measures to protect themselves. The theory is interesting, but I see it as a theory of how the epidemic caused paranoia, not of how lockdowns caused paranoia.
- origin_path 4y ago
  The epidemic was never serious enough to justify such measures. Note how the world is full of geriatric leaders who were fine - not one died of COVID.

munch117 4y ago

I doubt very much that anyone else had the power to impose lockdown conditions on Vladimir Putin. This kind of health paranoia is exactly what I'd expect to see in a society where there's an epidemic that is out of control: some people will take extreme measures to protect themselves. The theory is interesting, but I see it as a theory of how the epidemic caused paranoia, not of how lockdowns caused paranoia.

origin_path 4y ago
The epidemic was never serious enough to justify such measures. Note how the world is full of geriatric leaders who were fine - not one died of COVID.