Following days of claims regarding Vladimir Putin’s ill health and doppelgangers being deployed in lieu of his absence from the public eye, Ukraine has weighed into the Russian President’s reported use of body doubles.
The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate claimed it is “a fact” Putin uses doppelgangers.
Andrii Yusov, a representative of the Ukrainian military intelligence service, also commented on the flurry of unsourced claims regarding Putin’s death that circulated in past weeks on the Telegram messaging app.
He said, as reported by the media platform launched by Volodymyr Zelensky, UNITED24 Media: “As for the information from anonymous Telegram channels suggesting his death, unfortunately, this news has not been definitively confirmed.
“However, the use of doppelgangers is a technology employed in the Kremlin.”
Over the past few weeks, the Kremlin was forced to go on record to try and quash the insistent rumours circulating online about the Russian President’s health and doppelgangers.
In one latest attempt, Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on the weekend, as he attended a new national exhibition: “We have only one Putin!”
Making fun of reports and speculation on the topic, Mr Peskov added: “Now the ‘experts’ are guessing – there are three or four of them and who we now see every day.
“This morning they laid [flowers] at the [monument] of Minin and Pozharsky – this is the third or fourth ‘double’, it’s not clear.”
In October, he branded as an “absurd hoax” the claim made without providing evidence by a Telegram account the Kremlin was using body doubles to hide the fact Putin had fallen ill.
Earlier this week, Mr Yusov had commented on Mr Peskov’s repeated attempts to deny claims of body doubles.
He told Radio NV: “When the official Kremlin spokesmen repeatedly deny the existence of Putin’s doubles, the opposite conclusion becomes more plausible.”
Mr Yusov went on to claim multiple sources had confirmed Putin uses doppelgangers, an information he said was “hard to conceal”.
Similar speculation about Putin, he added “begins to erode the image of the Russian dictator from the inside”.
Mr Peskov tried multiple times to dispel rumours surrounding Putin’s doppelgangers – including in April, when he called “another lie” the claim circulating online Putin had deployed doubles to work instead of him while he was hiding in a bunker.
In 2020, Putin himself claimed to have rejected an offer to use body doubles for personal protection during the Chechen war.
