Vladimir Putin isn’t sick, he’s afraid. His spokesman used Putin-speak yesterday to describe the fitness of his boss — “his handshake could break your hand” — and squash rumours of a stroke. He left open the real reason why the Kremlin leader’s trip to Kazakhstan has been suddenly put off.
The best bet is that he has been advised to stay home until the masterminds behind the murder of Boris Nemtsov have been tracked down. Inside the Kremlin at least, the plot against Nemtsov is being seen as a plot against Mr Putin. And the best time to stage a coup is when the boss is out of Moscow.
The priority for the Kremlin and the investigators is to buy time. So they have mounted a sideshow, putting pressure on Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, to pursue with greater energy the associates of the accused contract killers of Nemtsov.
There are plenty of people in the Kremlin circle with grudges against Mr Kadyrov, including Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian secret service, the FSB, and Sergei Ivanov, the chief of the presidential administration.
Both seem to believe that Mr Kadyrov is playing a double game with Moscow: keeping the lid on Islamist ferment in Chechnya but subverting Moscow with an expanding web of radical Sunni contacts.
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Mr Putin seems happy to maintain the status quo if the former warlord continues to express loyalty. Chechnya is a diversion, a feint. The real split in the Kremlin is not about the Caucasus but about what to do in Ukraine.
The annexation of Crimea stoked up ultranationalist sentiment in Russia. For a while that was useful to Mr Putin. It empowered those critics who wanted Moscow to back the all-out use of force to keep Viktor Yanukovych, the discredited leader, in power. Now Mr Putin can’t get the genies back into the vodka bottle. They cheered when Mr Putin, in bare-chested on-horseback mode, announced that Russia could seize Kiev.
Instead of that, though, or even setting up a Donbas republic with a land-link to the Russian base on Crimea, Mr Putin seems to be ready to settle for a freezing of the conflict.
That has angered the ultranationalists and Kremlin sympathisers. That’s why they left a high-profile corpse on the president’s doorstep.
And it is why Mr Putin has decided that in a crisis, home is the best place to be.