While Putin is busy trying to destabilize Ukraine, his people are dying like flies from the virus. This is due to the reluctance of the Russians to get vaccinated. That, in turn, has two causes: the public, for very good reasons, doesn’t trust the government; and Putin isn’t pushing the vaccine very hard.
The latter point is counterintuitive. Why would a state that has nothing but contempt for its citizens have any reluctance to use strongarm tactics on the vaccine? We’re not talking about America and its history of libertarianism, after all.
The answer is that Putin, like Trump, puts himself forward as the personification of toxic masculinity. He can’t strut around in public like the Marlboro Man and then insist that his subjects do something different without looking like a ridiculous hypocrite, so he doesn’t, and they die.