submarine kursk sank. and putin talked about his ideas of leadership for the first time. and he was really talking about the presidency as a bureaucracy. and i think he still thinks that it s that. and so the two-month pause i think is meant to communicate that there is some kind of process, right, that they did something. they considered it. they maybe put it through the machine. none of that is true, but i think that the pause that putin often takes to do anything at all, part is a function of the decision, but part of it is his instinct for appearing bureaucratic. of course, he has a real love of dates, right? he does things on the anniversary of a particular thing. he loves symmetrical dates. so to have this man murdered, which like many others i assume this was a murder, on the 23rd of august, 23, which is the