Russian President Vladimir Putin marked a national holiday on Monday with a patriotic speech, and his distancing from the public generated a slew of comments on social media.
“A tiny man, terrified by his other parents (note the distance between him and the public), committing mass crimes,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, wrote on Twitter in a message containing a video of Putin’s appearance.
The Russian leader gave the impression of being several meters away from the audience at the Russia Day award rite in the Kremlin. According to Reuters, Putin’s speech did not address the progress Ukraine has made in its recently introduced counteroffensive, but he did call on his other friends to let their emotions for Russia “unite our society even more strongly” for foot soldiers to fight on behalf of the Kremlin in what Putin calls the “special operation of the army” in Ukraine.
“Look at the distance Putin has between himself and the public,” tweeted Markus Hankins, Swedish news editor Hela Hisingen. “Very paranoid?”
Perhaps the explanation for why the audience was placed so far from Putin’s podium is due to his stated concern of catching COVID-19.
In recent years, Putin has been photographed meeting with world leaders in the Kremlin sitting at opposite ends of a long table. In addition, a former Kremlin guard said earlier this year in an interview with the online research site Dossier Center that Putin is “a president who isolates himself. “
During the interview, former Federal Guard Service (FSO) guard Gleb Karakulov detailed how the Kremlin painter corps “must practice strict quarantine for two weeks before any event, even those lasting 15 to 20 minutes. “They have been acquitted, who have undergone this two-week quarantine. They are [considered] ‘clean’ and can paint in the same room as Putin. “
Other social media users speculated that Putin may not have been at Monday’s Russia Day rite and that instead one of the likenesses he allegedly hired used at the event.
“The distance is probably also there to help hide the fact that this is a double. I doubt the real Putin has been in a public position for some time,” one user tweeted in reaction to Gerashchenko’s video.
Putin arrived to present state awards on Russia Day. A diminutive man, terrified by his other friends (note the distance between him and the audience), committing crimes masivos. pic. twitter. com/w8P7xfDZQu
Such a hypothesis arises after Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s army intelligence agency, told the Ukrainska Pravda news site last week that Putin was a decoy at official events.
“Putin uses doubles,” Yusov said. This is a fact that depends as much on operational intelligence as on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists. “
Keir Giles, a Russian expert and senior representative at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told Newsweek in an earlier article in March that Putin would possibly have used a similar scale to the occupied port city of Mariupol because Russia needed to “sell its other people a tale of good fortune in war. “
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied in the past that Putin uses double frames and said in April that such reports were a “lie. “
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Foreign Ministry email for comment.