Missing Putin Storm Exposes Power Gap

Vladimir Putin has reappeared alive and apparently well at a meeting with the president of Krygyzstan in St Petersburg.

"Life would be boring without gossip," he said, looking arguably slightly pale, but rather pleased with himself.

The Kyrgyz president, Almazbek Atambayev, chimed in, reassuring waiting journalists: "He just now drove me around the grounds, he himself sat at the wheel."

Mr Putin's public appearance has put an end to 10 days of increasingly wild speculation as to his whereabouts.

The Russian phrase "Putin umer" - Putin died - had been trending on the Russian internet, as theories ranged from sudden death, to serious illness.

Others suggested he had been overthrown in a coup, he was having cosmetic surgery or was overseeing the birth of a love child in Switzerland.

People posted photographs on Twitter of a convoy of trucks approaching Red Square - troops coming in under cover to secure the Kremlin, they suggested.

Something was being built in Red Square and a big announcement was coming, the rumour mill said.

The reality - that they were building a stage for a concert to celebrate Wednesday's anniversary of the annexation of Crimea - only partially reassured those who were determined that "something was going on".

Ukrainian children made an animation showing Putin being abducted by aliens from the roof of the Kremlin.

The alarm was triggered by what increasingly seemed to be a Kremlin cover-up of the president's movements.

He was previously last seen in public on 5 March, at a meeting with the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi in Moscow.

A meeting the Kremlin said happened on March 11 turned out to have been pre-recorded on March 4.

Similarly, photographs of Putin supposedly meeting women for International Women's Day on 8 March were found to have been taken several days earlier.

The paranoia became such that even pictures released by the Kremlin of a meeting with the head of the supreme court on Friday were not enough to damp the flames.

It could have been at filmed any time, sceptics said, there are no windows, no calendars, no proof.

He was late to the meeting on Monday, keeping nervous journalists on edge, but pretty typical of his general approach to timekeeping. He is rarely on time for these events.

So now we know Putin is back, alive and still in power.

The reality is, we will probably never know where he has been for the last 10 days, if indeed he has been anywhere at all.

We are back to the "Kremlinology" of the Soviet days - where reporters tried to divine from the order in which the politburo lined up, who was in and who was out of favour.

The modern-day equivalent is examining pictures of Putin for signs of botox or flu.

What all of this does show though, and the serious point to take from all the feverish rumours, is how deeply personalised the system around Vladimir Putin has become.

Given the near-hysteria prompted by his 10-day public absence, the president may note his vertical-power style of leadership is not entirely without its disadvantages.