MYSTERY Putin Not Seen in Public in a Week; Has Cancelled Important Meetings

Geoffrey Smith writes in Fortune:

Moscow is awash with rumors about President Vladimir Putin, who hasn’t been seen in public in nearly a week. He’s also postponed a trip to meet with the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus, two important neighbors, and–even more intriguingly–skipped one of his favorite diary items, an annual address to his old colleagues at the Federal Security Service, or FSB (successors to the KGB)....Putin’s long-standing spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that ill-health isn’t the reason. His handshake “could break your hand,” Peskov said, unwittingly falling into the same kind of colorful language used 20 years ago to counter (very well founded) rumors of Boris Yeltsin’s infirmities.