Vladimir Putin, 70, has been at the centre of speculation about his health for months, as headlines claim he is suffering from conditions ranging from cancer to dementia.
While the official line from the Kremlin is Putin is well and in sound health, an increasing amount of reliable intelligence seems to suggest otherwise.
A trove of leaked US intelligence documents earlier this year claimed the despot was receiving chemotherapy, while his allies plotted to overthrow him.
Other rumours have seen the president accused of using a body double for public appearances, as he is so unrecognisable now due to his poor health.
Most recently, the General SVR Telegram channel, which claims inside knowledge from the Kremlin, outline one spell of ill-health which required a “council of doctors” to intervene.
READ MORE: Putin’s tribute to ‘true friend’ Silvio Berlusconi who he ‘admired for wisdom’
Word from inside the guarded Kremlin walls, however, remains consistent: Putin is fine.
Gleb Karakulov, a former Russian intelligence officer, said earlier this year Putin was in “better health than many other people of his age.”
And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov simply said that “everything is fine” when questioned recently about his health.
But these statements, designed to placate a media and public all too keen to learn more about the inner workings of the warmongering president’s world, have had little efficacy.
Most recently, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, Andriy Yusov, shed further insight when he claimed Putin used a body double for public events.
During an interview with online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, Yusov said: “Putin uses doubles. This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists.”
Citing an unannounced visit Putin made to Ukraine’s occupied regions in March, the official said: “His visits to the occupied south are a total fake, one organised rather poorly and hastily. There was a considerable difference both in Putin’s’ behaviour and his looks.
“He would never sit in that car and would never dress like that. He would never talk to alleged local residents, as we know that access to the real Putin in the Kremlin is restricted even for his own entourage — a meters-long table that becomes longer and longer, mandatory quarantines people undergo before meeting him.”
The claims have not been verified, but have been given credence by some experts.
Keir Giles, a Russia expert and a senior consulting fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told Newsweek in March that Putin may have used a body double in a visit to the occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol because Russia needed “to sell its people a story of success in the war.”
He said: “That includes letting them cling on to the idea that Russia is a force for good in the cities it has destroyed.
“That’s why a visit by Putin or one of his doubles to Mariupol had to take [place] in the same new block of flats that Russian state television has featured multiple times, rather than the scenes of devastation surrounding them.”
