EGN NEWS DESK
Either means, the query is: What is Putin going to do?
Dyumin, for his half, isn’t to be underestimated. Dubbed “Putin’s bodyguard” by Western media, he was, certainly, the Russian chief’s private bodyguard in 1999, earlier than being promoted to deputy head of the Federal Protective Service. But there’s much more to the 52-year-old. Born in Kursk, he is aware of the area properly, and he’s deeply vested within the Russian army, along with his father heading the Defense Ministry’s 4th Department of the Main Military Medical Directorate.
Dyumin went to army college and studied engineering, rising to deputy chief of the particular forces of the army intelligence directorate (GRU) on the time of Crimea’s annexation. He’s reputed to have orchestrated the flight of Ukraine’s former pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych, has served as chief of employees of the Russian Ground Forces and as a deputy protection minister earlier than turning into the unflappable and efficient governor of Tula in 2016.
Moved to the Kremlin earlier this 12 months, some now see Dyumin as Putin’s attainable successor-in-waiting. He’s considered as succesful, ruthless and chilly — not too dissimilar from his boss. And he’s recognized to be methodical — a attainable rationalization for the tardiness of Russia’s counter-offensive.
However, one other attainable rationalization is that Putin is as soon as once more demonstrating how he can develop into paralyzed in a disaster, even disappearing from public view — a attribute that’s beforehand drawn comparisons to Joseph Stalin, who retreated to his dacha and remained incommunicado when German forces blitzed their means into the Soviet Union in 1941.
The parallel was first drawn by Putin’s Muscovite critics throughout Covid-19. Holed up in his Novo-Ogaryovo property on the outskirts of Moscow, Putin was largely absent because the capital metropolis battled to curb the unfold of the lethal virus, with Mark Galeotti, an analyst at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, noting his trait of letting “sure critical challenges develop into another person’s drawback.”
And this may increasingly properly clarify a sample that’s emerged when man-made or pure disasters have struck on Putin’s watch. In 2000, he was vacationing at his residence in Sochi when the nuclear submarine Kursk sank within the Barents Sea. He ultimately met with the kinfolk of the 118 victims as a media storm erupted over his absence — and the assembly didn’t go properly. Then, in 2018, he was criticized for a sluggish response to an enormous shopping center blaze within the Siberian metropolis of Kemerovo that left not less than 64 dead, 41 of them youngsters. After the catastrophe, he was accused by bereaved households of repeating the identical mistake.
