OPINION:
Is Elon Musk the richest person in the world, or is it Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Mr. Putin is far quieter about his wealth than Mr. Musk. He does not brag about it or make a big display of it. Still, since he came to power in late 1999, he has had ample opportunity to fleece the Russian treasury for his own benefit and that of his family.
He is also using it in an effort to live forever.
Everyone, eventually, must come to terms with his or her own mortality. The superrich, on the other hand, have the ability to seek ways around their demise. That is why Mr. Putin is putting about $26 billion of Russia’s money (no sense in spending your own) into anti-aging research and the production of artificial organs.
It all comes back to a September 2025 “hot mic” moment when Mr. Putin was caught talking to Chinese President Xi Jinping about how humans could achieve “immortality” by replacing their organs.
Mr. Putin is, of course, quite capable of pulling our leg on this sort of scale. Yet what all this involves, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is a serious effort to achieve if not immortality, then something approximating it.
Anti-aging research in the U.S. is following Russian research along many of the same lines, but, according to The Journal report, the Russian research is now a state enterprise.
Mr. Putin’s “New Health Preservation Technologies” is for replacing parts of the human body. This could be done by “bioprinting,” the three-dimensional printing of human tissue, and “xenotransplantation,” the growth of human organs inside miniature pigs, which are supposedly genetically compatible with humans.
These efforts were announced in 2024 and promised to save 175,000 Russian lives by 2030. That coincides nicely with projected Russian losses in Ukraine by then.
Can you imagine if President Trump were leading such an effort? Headlines worldwide would be screaming that it was proof Mr. Trump was never going to give up the presidency.
Proceedings for another Trump impeachment would begin and again go nowhere.
Yet for all the catcalls and jibes, Mr. Putin may be onto something. Many heart transplant patients live 14 years or more after their surgeries. Kidney transplant patients can live for 20 years or longer, and lung transplant patients can live about six to eight more years, depending on the patient’s overall health.
Those numbers will keep improving, but as good as medical science is, it has not figured out how to transplant the most important organ in the body: the brain.
We have long been aware of Mr. Putin’s medical conditions. He has reportedly suffered from various cancers and has Parkinson’s disease, though allied intelligence has not confirmed these infirmities. If he is successful in growing artificial organs, then doctors could extend his life by as many as 20 years.
That would mean no peace in Ukraine for a very long time. Mr. Putin is dedicated, as is his “philosopher,” Alexander Dugin, to the conquest of Ukraine as a precursor to the reconquest of the Soviet Empire.
We must remember that Mr. Putin, in April 2005, described the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” His dedication to it stems from Mr. Dugin’s description in his “Foundations of Geopolitics” of the reconquest of Ukraine as the first step, without which Mr. Putin could not achieve his further goal of reunifying the Soviet Empire.
Mr. Putin is 73, an age at which health begins to deteriorate. We must hope that his efforts in his “Health Preservation Technologies” will not overcome whatever ills befall him. That is, we have to hope for his death. We do not do assassinations anymore. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 abolished that tactic.
If Mr. Putin, by whatever methods and means, manages to extend his life, he will continue to be a major threat to American security. He will keep trying to build a following dedicated to his ambitions, individuals who can pick up where he leaves off, but that is never a sure thing.
It is just a race against time, and either side could win.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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