“Bunker Grandpa” not in Cherson?
Kiev sees doubles at work during Putin’s visit
04/19/2023, 11:45 p.m
Is he real or not? There have long been rumors that Russian President Putin has been represented by doubles on certain occasions. Once again, Kyiv is fueling such speculation. Recently, “not the real Putin” is said to have been out and about in the war zone.
According to Kiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin was represented by a double during his alleged visit to the front in the occupied territories of Ukraine. “That wasn’t the real Putin,” Ukraine’s National Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov claimed without evidence on TV. “In order to be able to talk to the real Putin, you have to be in quarantine for at least 10 to 14 days.” The Putin sighted in Cherson was “an ordinary double, of which, as is well known, there are several”.
According to Danilov, Putin is “a frightened man” and the idea that he has decided to visit the front is simply impossible. According to the Kremlin on Tuesday, Putin had visited both the occupied areas of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. The exact time of the alleged visit was not given. Information from the war zone cannot be independently verified.
“The Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has visited the headquarters of the General Staff of the military unit ‘Dnipro’ in the Kherson region,” the Kremlin said. Putin spoke with the commander of the Russian Air Force, Mikhail Teplinksi, and other high-ranking military officials about the situation in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. According to the information, the Russian President also visited the headquarters of the National Guard in Luhansk. “It is important to me to hear your opinion on the situation, to listen to you, to exchange information,” Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that the Russian President would “visit the new regions more frequently”. In March, Putin paid a visit to the Crimean Peninsula, which has been annexed by Russia since 2014. He then traveled on to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, which was besieged by the Russian army for months last year and captured in May 2022.
“I don’t finally understand if he’s alive”
On Tuesday this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj visited the heavily contested city of Avdiivka in the east of the country. Zelenskyy is “the exact opposite” of Putin, Danilov now emphasized, since he goes to the front at any time. “That’s the difference to bunker grandpa Putin, who soon becomes afraid of himself.”
It was not until January that Selensykj railed against Putin against the background of repeated rumors about doubles. “I don’t finally understand if he’s alive,” said the Ukrainian head of state via video at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He is not sure whether the 70-year-old shown on the screens is the real Putin. It is also unclear who makes decisions in Russia at all, said the 44-year-old on the question of possible negotiations between Russia and Ukraine on peace.
The Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov once said that he believed there were several doubles of Putin. In fact, Putin once stated that for security reasons he had been advised in the past to use a doppelganger at official appointments. “The idea came up, but I gave up on doubles,” he said. The Kremlin rejected the doubts expressed by Kiev about the existence of Putin.