An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying tsar, Vladimir Putin turns 70 tomorrow while his brutal war against Ukraine is exploding in his puffy, currants-in-dough, steroid-addled face.
Cargo 200s – Soviet slang for soldier corpses – are piling up; surviving troops are voting with their feet; draftees are running for the border; their mothers and wives are protesting in the streets.
How could the man who, on February 23, stood proud as the ruler of the world’s biggest country, armed with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, owning treasure in oil and gas, whose trophies include such Cold War Two victories as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, have messed everything up so badly?
Age is just a number, they say. Maybe, but birthdays are way stations on the path to old age.
Putin was born in 1952 when Stalin was still alive. The original monster once wrote: “I trust no one, not even myself.”
It is not a bad line for his successor’s obituary too.
On his 10th birthday in 1962, Vladimir was pitifully thin, a waif, blond, dirt-poor, living on the wrong side of the tracks in Leningrad – now St Petersburg – killing rats.
In a rare photo of him with his very old “official” mother he looks unloved, sparking rumours that his natural mother abandoned him at a very early age. And that could explain the pitiless psychopathy of the old man today, says Jim Fallon, professor of psychiatry at the University of California.
Aged 20 in 1972, he attended Leningrad State University, and wanted to be a KGB spy, the fairy-tale exit out of poverty for so many clever but poor Russians.
At 30, he was in the KGB but not prospering. One assessor said Putin lacked empathy for others and his risk analysis was atrocious.
Putin turned 40 in 1992, his beloved Soviet Union tipped into the rubbish bin of history.
For a while he moonlighted as a cab driver, then became deputy to the mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak.
A photo shows him carrying the mayor’s bag, a forlorn loser with a Bobby Charlton combover. Behind the scenes, Putin was cutting deals with the mafia. As he turned 50, his world had changed, utterly.
In the last years of 1990s, Putin inveigled himself into the good books of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, by then a senile alcoholic, and became the head of the FSB, the new name for the KGB.
Russia ’s Prosecutor-General, Yuri Skuratov, was investigating Yeltsin’s family and, separately, ex-KGB spy Alexander Lebedev – pal of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson – when kompromat video of a man looking like the law officer in bed with prostitutes appeared.
Skuratov was fired and Putin got the keys to the Kremlin in 1999. His rule began poorly but that September he became a tough guy, denouncing “Chechen terror” attacks on a Moscow apartment with bombs which killed 300.
The evidence is compelling that the Russian secret state were behind the massacres: that is, that Putin blew up Russia.
Come 60 in 2012, Putin was the tsar of all the Russias, filthy rich, father of two official daughters and maybe seven more kids.
He was also accused of being a serial killer responsible for the poisonings, shootings and mystery deaths of a host of Kremlin critics.
Perhaps the best known was Alexander Litvinenko. The former KGB spy accused Putin of being a paedophile in 2006.
Within weeks, he was dead, poisoned in London with polonium 210, manufactured in Russia and delivered by two agents of the Russian secret state.
What is certain is that if you opposed Putin and you were good at your job, you were very likely to end up dead.
I got to know four such critics: Anna Politkovskaya, Natasha Estemirova, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny. In order: poisoned, later shot; shot; shot; poisoned, and now in prison.
But on his 70th birthday today things are finally looking bleak for Putin. Why did he wreck everything and risk invading Ukraine?
Maybe he knows he is running out of time to rebuild the Soviet Union.
I met him in 2014 at a mammoth museum in Siberia when I pretended to be a professor of mammothology, then doorstepped him for the BBC ’s Panorama about the shooting down of MH17 and the killings in Ukraine.
He was supple and subtle, lying ever so smoothly. Back then he looked thin-faced, like a weasel.
Today he looks like a hamster, his cheeks stuffed with straw: evidence, according to Professor Ashley Grossman of Oxford University, suggesting he may be suffering from cancer of the lymphatic system and on steroids.
If so, he may have invaded Ukraine because he has roid-rage.
Putin is losing his grip on power because the Ukrainian army, backed by Western guns, is beating his killing machine hollow.
He is a fragile monster, running out of time, out of soldiers, out of road, surrounded by yes-men.
At 70, Putin has no clear idea of how the world, Ukraine, the war he started and his own country and army work in the 21st century.
You might wager a fiver on the master of the Kremlin making it to 71 but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Like the poet Shelley foreseeing the end of George III, the Kremlin’s grave-diggers are smacking their chops, spades at the ready for the turn of the dead tsar walking to go six feet under.
John Sweeney is the author of Killer In The Kremlin, published by Bantam Press.
