Raise your vodkas for a toast, please: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin turns 74 today. Alexander Shuvaev, the major general Putin appointed in May to govern the front-line region of Belgorod, thanked him for support that helps locals "live and work in the most difficult conditions," and wished him strong health. Putin doesn’t need such wishes from his underlings, for strong health is the one thing the Russian state reliably delivers—to one man.
A Russian boy born this year can expect to live about 68 years, according to United Nations figures, six years short of a president born more than seven decades earlier. One born in 1952, as Putin was, could expect 53. By a rough Newsweek calculation from U.N. life tables, only about three in 10 of them made it to 74.
Then again, few have had his care plan as mid-life turned into old age. The investigative outlet Proekt tracked doctors from the presidential hospital trailing him to Sochi, a number that appears to be swelling with age. Five on average in 2016-17, nine by 2019.
The Kremlin has denied recurrent speculation that Putin is ill, as viral videos show strange hand movements and a limping gait. Proekt reported that Putin has even taken baths in deer-antler extract. Perhaps it worked; he’s not dead yet.
Last year, a hot mic caught Putin, via his interpreter, telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that organ transplants might let people "even achieve immortality." A preoccupation, perhaps, of an aging man approaching the inevitable. Many of his Russian subjects would settle for 60. At 2023 death rates, a 15-year-old Russian boy has a 30 percent chance of dying before reaching it, U.N. data show.
That is about the sub-Saharan African average, and worse than Afghanistan, Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo. It happens in an oil-rich country the World Bank promoted to "high-income" in 2024, partly on a surge in military activity as a war economy fuels its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russian women outlive their men by nearly 12 years, the world’s third-widest gap.
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