I've been following rumors that the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov might be terminally ill with kidney failure. He has come out, publically, and denied the rumors, but there's no way to tell what is going on. They managed to nurse Biden through embarrassingly-obvious dementia for an election and a full presidential term, after all.
This is such an odd character, at any rate. His father, Akhmat-Khadzhi Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov, was the imam who called out the jihad against Russia, in the first Chechen separatist war. He switched sides in the second separatist war, and the Russians made him the president. Islamists (well, other Islamists) blew up his car, in Grozny, and his son soon took over and has been ruling since.
He has two wives, 12 children, multiple mansions, and has amassed a great fortune through whichever means politicians over there amass great fortunes, while their residents grind along in poverty and despair. The Kadyrov rise to power was an important move, for Russia, as the Chechens have become one of the main sources for fighters in the Ukrainian invasion, including being disproportionately present near the most war crimes. Millions of people are hoping for him to finally die, so that there can be political change, over there, and fewer horrors, elsewhere. That's probably why the rumor of his impending death spread so quickly: wishful thinking.
And this reminded me of why voting for your leadership, although highly imperfect, does serve one purpose well: getting rid of someone the public doesn't like. I don't know how popular Kadyrov is, but his government is highly corrupt and infamous for racking up extrajudicial slayings of gays, journalists, political opponents and people who have cut him off in traffic. Even Hillary Clinton is rumored to study his life's work.
His insistance that the war in Ukraine is a holy jihad is especially reprehensible, as he's betraying his own people with daft religious posturing, pressuring them to join a battlefield that the Russians themselves have long since nicknamed the meat grinder. He humbly calls himself Putin's Foot Soldier, but is more commonly known as Putin's Bloodhound and that branding seems to stick. At any rate, the Ukrainian war has helped keep him in power, by sending so many angry, poor, young men off to die elsewhere. They have stubbornly good health, unusually long life expectancies, and elevated fertility, for Russian citizens, so it's clear that something needed to be done.
The participation in the war has led to a sort of death-boom, as the 14 million rubles death payments his soldiers receive have created a latent economic surge, helping to balance out any troubles in its oil sector. (Followed rapidly by inflation, as eating your human seed corn doesn't actually fuel sustainable growth, โ surprise, surprise โ but I digress.)
As I was saying, perhaps he is very popular, in Chechnya, but there's no way to truly know how popular, as there is no reliable, free, anonymous, decisive polling. By decisive, I mean that the person being polled is aware of the gravity and importance of their vote cast. They are not merely telling someone on the phone what they feel, at this moment, but are making some strategic or even merely tactical decision to change or keep their government.
This is missing in Chechnya, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea.... that whole potfull of psychopathic despots, who are amazingly indifferent to the well-being of their populace. I suspect it is truly impossible for any of us, outside of such countries, to understand why crushing sanctions and rapidly-climbing popular misery has so little impact on their political careers: they don't care and there is no upcoming vote that might make them care. They will never change. The sanctions and etc. are simply a way to starve their particular beast, slowly, so that it can't devour its neighbors.
Even if Russians began starving and freezing to death on their potato fields, Putin can just put on his snazzy shades and grin for the cameras. After all, if they have no potatoes, let them eat cake! Not only does he not care, he doesn't care, to an extent we can only find baffling. We have no frame of reference, for such rulers. We can only hope that someone around him might care, and remove him from office, in their traditional fashion.
Americans whine, incessently, but I think we can all see that trading in Trump for Biden, and then back to Trump effected some tangible difference in policy. It wasn't mere democratic theater. Merkel retiring, in Germany, rapidly uncovered the economic and political poison of her chancellorship, and we are all grateful that we didn't need to beg the USA to surgically remove her, like Maduro. Merkel, like all democratic politicians we have grown utterly sick of, was painlessly sent on a book tour and out to the golfing range, whence she proceeds to annoy and bore us with tiresome excuses about her own incompetence. Let her talk.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, democratic-style. If only it were so easy to be rid of Kadyrov. Perhaps we can offer to build him a presidential library or name a bridge after him, so that he joins the book tour. But we'll likely be stuck, disappointedly reading the political obituaries, with the fate of millions of people determined by the blips of his dialysis machine.