Russian leader Vladimir Putin is notorious for hiding in a bunker during the ongoing war, insisting on taste testers to make sure his food isn’t poisoned and not even meeting his military generals until they take COVID tests.
So videos posted today of Putin wading into crowds of supporters raised some questions.
“Putin body double on the loose,” Jason Jay Smart, a contributor to Ukrainian outlet the Kyiv Post added on social media. “The real Putin doesn’t meet folks unless they do quarantine for a week,” he added.
Earlier this year, a former senior Russian security officer said that the Kremlin leader “surrounds himself with an impenetrable barrier of quarantines.”
And a former Russian officer-turned-nationalist military blogger wrote on Telegram on Thursday that it was a “person vaguely resembling the president (and not at all requiring compliance with the two-week quarantine necessary to get an appointment with the president) walked around Derbent.”
While there is no proof of this body double conspiracy, Ukraine believes it.
“Putin uses doubles,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Kyiv’s military intelligence agency, told Ukrainska Pravda earlier this month. “This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists.”