Questions about sudden absences of a leader are a hallmark of authoritarian leadership regimes. [View all]

[Tommy Carcetti]

For example, in 2015, right after the murder of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on the streets of Moscow (later conveniently blamed on Chechen extremists), Vladimir Putin disappeared from public view for 10 days. Not a single word from him or sight of him.

Then, just as he had gone, he suddenly reappeared, without any explanation.

Fiona Hill wrote about it at the time:

What If Putin Disappeared for Real?
The Russian president’s absence points to Russia’s looming succession crisis.

By FIONA HILL March 16, 2015

Well, he’s ba-ack, but Russia’s brief sojourn without Vladimir Putin in public view won’t be forgotten soon. Even as Putin rather airily dismissed the issue of his long public absence on Monday, saying life “would be boring without gossip,” the frenzied rumor-mongering over the Ten Days That Shook the Twitter World raised a lot of serious issues. Most of all, Putin’s temporary disappearance illustrated the fragility of the hyper-personalized political system that the president of this still-heavily-nuclear-armed nation has created around himself. And, just perhaps, it illustrated the danger to the rest of us.

We still don’t know the reason for Putin’s AWOL act. But the rumors that surrounded it are a sure sign of where Russian politics are headed: toward a succession crisis.

During the week and half that Putin was not seen in public—the mystery ended on Monday when he posed for the cameras with the president of Kyrgyzstan in St. Petersburg—stories choked the Internet about the usually ubiquitous Russian leader, who was first elected president 15 years ago this very month. The initial prosaic explanation that Putin might be sick and recuperating was dismissed not only by social media, but also at various times by his own press spokesman. The vacuum of information was filled with a host of rumors ranging from the whimsical and sentimental (abducted by aliens or attending the birth of his lovechild in Switzerland) to the disturbingly plausible: a coup was underway, the brutal murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on a bridge below the Kremlin on February 27 was the product of vicious infighting inside the Kremlin’s walls. It was a provocation (as Putin himself declared when he got news of the assassination) and a power play to set off a change in presidential power.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/vladimir-putin-disappearance-russia-succession-116107/

Of course, that all was 10 years ago. Putin's still very much around, still very much in power, and continues to fuck this world sideways in everything he does.

I think it's part of a narcissistic trait in these types of people. They might like to step back for a while, as if to say, "What would life be like if I weren't around?", only to then re-emerge, basically saying, "Just kidding! You're still stuck with me!"