In the last few days, rumours have been swirling around the darker parts of the internet that Vladimir Putin has died of cancer, that his death has been hushed up and that a double has taken his place in the Kremlin.
Tasked about this by reporters, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov laughed: “Everything is fine with him, this is absolutely another fake.”
Has Putin got a double? a brave reporter prodded.
“This belongs to the category of absurd information hoaxes that a whole series of media discuss with enviable tenacity. This evokes nothing but a smile,” Peskov added.
Peskov lies as he breathes.
Does the master of the Kremlin have a double? Yes, I believe so.
Vladimir Putin and I have met, once, in a mammoth museum in Siberia, while I was reporting for BBC Panorama. In 2014, after the shooting down of MH17, I mingled with the other professors of mammothology until the little Chekist walked into the museum and then I door-stepped him about the killings of not just Russians and Ukrainians but Malaysian, Dutch, Australian and British too. He was petite, surprisingly effeminate and gave a long and boring answer which ducked the issue, that a Russian BUK missile had blown 298 innocent people out of the sky. A few hours later, someone hit me in the stomach and then walked away. I guess the Kremlin didn’t like my question.
When I met him, there was a wall of Kremlin muscle behind him and that was nine years ago, before COVID, before his big war against Ukraine, when he was far more accessible than he is now.
The reason I am convinced that he has multiple doubles is a simple anomaly, which repeats itself. Vladimir Putin is morbidly afraid of human contact with people he cannot control. And yet Vladimir Putin has been filmed in a car to cross the Kerch bridge, hobnobbing with the kids on the street in the city of Derbent, in Russia’s deep south. Anomalies are the gold of investigative journalism. The clock has struck thirteen. My working hypothesis is the only possible explanation to the morbidly fearful/non morbidly fearful Putin is that there are multiple copies.
Remember the moment just before the big war when Putin met President Macron of France at the end of a very, very long table? Putin spent COVID down a very, very long decontamination tunnel. He is morbidly afraid of other people’s germs. The word from inside the Kremlin is that people close to him, guards, flunkies, ministers and generals, have to have daily COVID and other medical tests. If they are outsiders, they have to isolate for a week, longer, before they can be ushered into his presence.
Locked inside the dungeon of absolute power, isolated, afraid, Putin has become Howard Hughes with snow on his boots. Like the American ultra-rich lunatic and his predecessor, Stalin, he trusts no-one, not even himself. He is so paranoid about other people learning about his health that when he went for a poo in Versailles in 2017 when visiting the French president, he did his business in a Kremlin-designed poo tray. A critical member of Team Putin is the pooman, who picked up the poo and put it, wrapped up in some way, in a briefcase. Paris Match reported this story in June last year, adding that sources in the Middle East said that the Putin’s pooman following his master had been at work there too.
See - https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade-rumeur-ou-tumeur-1810897
When Putin dies, I will make a bee-line for Moscow, to interview the pooman.
Putin’s fear of the germs of others is a constant.
Two days before the big war, Putin held a televised gathering of his top spies, national security chiefs and assorted WaBenzi – a Swahili word meaning the people who are driven in Mercedes Benz limousines. The stand-out moment was when the head of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, forgot his lines. Putin played the mafia boss, mocking the incompetence of his wretched underling: “speak plainly…” But the chief of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, at a security council meeting on Monday, during which Putin grilled each of the members. But the big take-away is that all the Kremlin WaBenzi were sitting a good twenty-five feet away from Putin.
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A third moment came in March last year when Putin, clad in a fancy Italian ski jacket worth several thousand dollars, addressed the faithful in a big soccer stadium. On the podium, he was on his own. No-one was allowed near him.
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Contrast these three instances of Putin isolation with his visit to Derbent, a city on the very edge of southern Russia.
See – https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/29/7409087/
Vladimir Putin gets out of his motorcade in June this year and goes full tilt into a crowd of screaming, adoring youngsters. It’s all very impressive of Putin’s human touch and courage. Derbent is in Dagestan, next door to Chechnya, where militant Islamists are just about controlled, for now, by Putin’s quisling, Ramzan Kadyrov. For Putin to go to Derbent is doubly striking because he rarely, if ever, risks his physical being.
Explain the anomaly. Why is the Putin in the Kremlin afraid of human contact and the Putin in Derbent the opposite? Because they are not the same man.
Derbent Putin is greyer than the real thing. And a lot more hesitant. I’m pretty sure he popped up another time, in December 2022, when Brave Putin drove a Mercedes across the Kerch bridge connecting the Russian mainland to occupied Crimea. After the bridge was blown up by the Ukrainians, it was fixed by the Russians. It was brave of Putin to take the risky drive.
Or brave of his double.
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Perhaps the clincher is footage of a Putin staring at the wrong wrist looking for his watch. This August, when the real thing was almost certainly somewhere nice in southern Russia by the Black Sea, having a holiday, a Putin held a boring meeting of Russian Council for Strategic Development and National Projects. A Putin checked the time, looking at his left wrist. The watch wasn’t there. A Putin pulled its face. The real thing wears his watch on the right wrist.
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And then there’s the shoes. The real Putin is a little man but he is not a dwarf. When I challenged him in the mammoth museum, he answered my question, then turned on his heels. I got a good look at his heels and they were normal.
A Putin was photographed meeting students in Moscow. On the group photo, you can clearly see that he is wearing Cuban heels. My working hypothesis is that Putin’s machismo is so intense that he would never want a double to be taller than him in real life.
On the group photo, you can clearly see that he is wearing Cuban heels. My working hypothesis is that Putin’s machismo is so intense that he would never want a double to be taller than him in real life. So his double is a bit of a dwarf. Likewise with the pooman, the moment the real Putin dies, I will do my utmost to track down and have a vodka or nine with Vladimir Putin’s copy.
John Sweeney’s Killer In The Kremlin is published by Penguin.