His confidants.

I spent way too much time looking and analyzing pictures of him last night. I turned up a really good article on his health.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15000709/The-8-key-signs-puffy-faced-Putin-hiding-secret-illness-heads-Alaska-meet-Trump.html

Lotsa' pics and detailed explanations on each.

Konstantin over at "Inside Russia" has said the only way they ever knew a leader had been removed or had died was that alll the TV channels and radio stations would start playing "Swan Lake" and that would go on for three days. At the end of three days, the new leader was announced along with a funeral date for the old one if he'd kicked the bucket.

Personally, I think about the only way we'd notice something going on is if some of Putin's most trusted people suddenly disappear, appointed to nothing jobs in the background to keep them out of the way so that one of his hand picked loyalists will succeed him---you know, the way Shoigu was kind of shoved into the background while an absolute nobody of a numbers cruncher was appointed Minister of Defense. Even that is a long shot, Putin has been known to teach people he doesn't quite want to get rid of a lesson.

No, I think they'll return to the 3 days of Swan Lake after which the FSB will announce who they've picked to be the next raging asshole strongman to screw the Russian people while he and his buddies get rich. Likely the troops in Ukraine will be told to dig in where they are but not to try to advance. It will take Ukraine some years to dislodge them. The Russian people will believe and do what they're told.

Russian government lives on secrecy — and abuse of the commoners — and murder of the inconvenient. They have since the times of the Tsars.

Funny thing about reading old memoirs by foreigners who lived there in the 1800s, and novels and memoirs by Russians — one gets a sense of the Russian character that forms the basis of the kinds of government they end up with, whether Tsarist or Soviet or oligarchical.

and crushed any hope the Russian people had by making it a dictatorship of the Party instead of a dictatorship of the workers. The inner circle of the party just took over where the aristocracy had left off, with Lenin as the new Czar. Russia's take on Marrxism was authoritarian, which was not what Marx was hoping for. The only good thing about it was that the new aristocrats couldn't own much of anything directly which cut down on the greed and thee grabbing and allowed a lot of building to go on. It wasn't the right kind of building--not enough housing, ever--but they did build.

I wouldn't be surprised to see them go back to this system, Putin and his variety of capitalism has only brought out the greed and the grabbers while the country started to fall apart, and that's even without the war.

So don't be surprised to see a new embrace of pseudo Marxism. It was a bad deal, but it was probably the best deal they had, barring the misrule of Stalin.