Vladimir Putin is going to be 70 years old this year.

He may be the richest man in the world. He may have super-yachts, and Swiss bank accounts containing ill-gotten billions. He may have been victorious in armed conflicts in Crimea, Syria, Belarus, Africa and Kazakhstan.

But he can’t stop the march of time, can he? He can’t outrun death.

Any of us who have hit the milestone birthdays — for punk-rocking me it was 20, seriously — know what all those birthday parties signify. They start to add up. They mean you’re getting a lot closer to the end than the start.

And, predictably, the Russian dictator has frantically attempted to forestall the end. There’s been those vaguely homoerotic airbrushed photos of him shirtless, on horseback. There’s been the staged judo competitions. There’s been the nipping and tucking, evidenced by the fact that his head closely resembles a balloon — a balloon found at one of those aforementioned birthday parties.

Oh, and steroidal Putin’s puffiness and reddish hue, as observed by French President Emmanuel Macron’s staffers, following Macron’s meeting with Putin last month — facing off at opposing ends of a 20-foot-long table in Moscow. Putin didn’t look or sound right, they said. Paranoid, they said.

Because Putin grows old, grows old, per T.S. Eliot. And that, more than anything, is what will ultimately defeat him. Just as you can’t take it with you, you also can’t invade any more countries when you’re dead. Can you?

Because he knows the end may be nigh, Putin is in search of a legacy. All leaders do that. Justin Trudeau, for example, actually formed a coalition government with the NDP last week to give himself enough time to craft a legacy. (Because his only legacy, so far, is serial scandal and serial blackface.)

The New York Times’ Roger Cohen published a magnum opus about Putin’s own legacy hunt on the weekend. Cohen’s piece is as long as a book, but it’s meticulously-researched and well worth reading. It’ll tell you more about Vladimir Putin, and Vladimir Putin’s plans, than anything else out there to date.

Here’s a sampling of what Cohen reported:

• He’s changed. Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “I’ve never seen Putin go from a little shy, to pretty shy, to arrogant, and now megalomaniacal.”
• He’s angry. Sylvie Bermann, a diplomat who knew Putin before and after the Soviet Union broke up: “Something happened. He spoke with a new rage and fury.”
• He sees us as weak and decadent. Michel Duclos, head of a French think-tank: “He became convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis. (His) way forward was confrontation.”
• He thinks he’s winning. Former French president Francois Hollande: “Putin tells himself: ‘I am advancing everywhere. Where am I in retreat? Nowhere!’”

And that last observation may be so, for now. While returning Ukraine to Mother Russia has taken more time than anyone thought, Putin has not yet abandoned his obscene, genocidal war. He hasn’t won, but he hasn’t lost, either.

But he has dramatically miscalculated. All the things he most wanted to avoid — a unification of NATO, a stronger European Union, a militarized Germany, a teetering Russian economy, and a defiant Ukrainian people — have now happened.

Over the weekend, U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” His aides later denied that Biden is seeking regime change in Russia, but the president’s meaning could not have been more clear: He wants Putin gone. Dead or alive. But gone.

He will be. If not via an assassin’s bullet, or a Kremlin coup, or a popular uprising, Putin will be gone.

The Grim Reaper is heading his way, and the Grim Reaper can be delayed.

But never denied.

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The problem with backroom deals is that they don’t stay in the backroom. They leak out.

Also, they don’t just look secretive, they look sneaky. And, because they are done behind closed doors with just a chosen few, they look wildly undemocratic, too.

The Liberal-NDP deal to keep Justin Trudeau in power until 2025 is all of that: Sneaky, undemocratic and, now, public. It transforms Justin Trudeau, minority prime minister, into Justin Trudeau, majority prime minister.

Which isn’t what most Canadians wanted, back in October. But it’s now what they’ll get.

CBC’s Ottawa bureau broke the news, naturally. That PMO-CBC oozy coziness notwithstanding, a Grit-Dipper government is upon the land. An Axis of Weasels, essentially.

Forget about NDP “Leader” Jagmeet Singh, because he is now, officially and deservedly, forgettable. He has folded the once-proud party of Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent into the welcoming arms of the PMO, and his NDP accordingly no longer exists. As in all mergers and acquisitions, it will be followed by plenty of layoffs — of New Democrats. But that will come later.

For now, us mere mortals — you know, the ones who previously thought we were the bosses in this erstwhile democracy — are left to contemplate motive. Which is what everyone does when confronted with a crime scene. Since we know whodunnit, in this undemocratic crime, we are left to ask: Why did they?

This writer counts four possibilities. Here they are.

One, the Liberals are worried about who the next Conservative leader will be. If it were to be Pierre Poilievre, the backroom deal-making wouldn’t have been necessary: Internal Liberal polling apparently shows that the Ottawa-area MP, if victorious, will guarantee continued Liberal hegemony.

Jean Charest, on the other hand, is the Tory leadership contender most likely to hand Trudeau a pink slip. But — even so — methinks the dirty deal wasn’t done for that reason.

Two, they’re having some fun. Former Brian Mulroney chief of staff Norman Spector once told me that the only fun PMO staff have, really, is planning their next international junket — and leaking stories about cabinet shuffles and deal-making. So, there’s that possibility – someone in PMO is making mischief.

But that, too, is unlikely. The Axis of Weasels Deal, which makes the Meech Lake Accord look like a paragon of democracy, is causing big waves already.

Three — and this is more likely than the first two possibilities – Messrs. Trudeau and Singh are planning something really, really big, policy-wise. It may not be nationalizing banks or pharmaceutical companies, but one can be reasonably certain that it will be Big Leftie — dental care, more pharmacare, more everything-care. Cradle-to-grave stuff, print more money, etc.

As evidenced by the near-total absence of Turner-Chretien-Martin-Dion Liberals in his circle, Trudeau long ago ceased to be a real Liberal. So a big and dramatic policy move, lurching far left, is likelier.

Four, and this motive is the most likely: Justin Trudeau is leaving, or wants to. Given his performance in the last federal election (where he phoned it in), and given his recent Instagram-sponsored junkets around the globe (wherein he could just use the phone instead), Trudeau looks decidedly disinterested in the job. Unhappy, too — which is what most Canadians are feeling about him: Unhappy.

An Axis of Weasels dirty deal gives Trudeau lots of runway to cobble together some sort of a legacy achievement, which is necessary in his case: His only legacy, to date, is the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Aga Khan scandal, and the WE scandal. And lots of missteps and malapropisms that caused us peoplekind to wince.

So, he needs a big legacy thing. And, along the way, it would buy his successor — whomever she may be — sufficient time to clean out the muck in the PMO Augean stables. New leader, new team, new plan, blah blah blah. The usual.

Anyway, whatever the motive — and whatever the consequences — a Liberal-NDP deal is what we’ve got. Justin Trudeau for years and years to come, folks.

Dunno about you, but I need a shower.

— Warren Kinsella ran the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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