On video: Russian President Vladimir Putin makes a surprise visit to Mariupol, Ukraine (Reuters)
Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit earlier this week (Sunday) to Mariupol, the port city in southern Ukraine that was occupied by the Russians, according to reports from the Russian state media.
An official video showed Putin driving a car through city streets at night, visiting a concert hall.
This is Putin's first visit to the territory occupied this year by the Russian army.
According to the TASS news agency, he arrived at the scene by helicopter and met with local residents.
But this visit was met with derision by officials in Ukraine, because according to them Putin himself did not visit the place at all but sent a double to take his place on the tour.
Anton Gershchenko, a senior adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, published three photos of Putin's chin, wondering if they belonged to the same person and wrote: "What's up with your chin, Putin? It seems that recently his makeup (that is, for the last trips of the animal man in the bunker to the peninsula Crimea and Mariupol) had to work with a rather poor quality copy. Not even a duplicate but a copy of the duplicate... I wonder which of them was real?'
Putin's chin compared to the doubles (photo: documentation on social networks according to Article 27 A of the Copyright Law)
The photo he shared shows Putin, 70, a month ago in a speech to the Federal Assembly in Moscow, another photo was from his visit to the Sevastopol seaport in Crimea on March 18 and the third was from excerpts published from Putin's tour of Mariupol.
The first photo shows a tight chin, but in the photo from Sevastopol - "Putin" has a sagging chin, while the chin in the photo from Mariupol looks firmer but not like the photo from Moscow.
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The Daily Mail reported that a Russian source said: "Putin has these moments where he looks like Babushka (Grandma) without teeth."
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To the full article
Recently there have been repeated claims that Putin uses doubles on some of his trips outside of Moscow, or to places where there are a lot of people.
The General SVR Telegram channel strongly claims that Putin was not in Sevastopol or Mariupol at all.
"According to the information from our sources in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has not visited Crimea or Mariupol," claimed the channel, which according to reports is run by senior sources within the Kremlin, apparently by a former lieutenant general in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service known as "Viktor Mikhailovich".
"Actually, the person who was present during the visit to Crimea was 100 percent the double of the president, so only a short visit was made and only for the purpose of taking a video."
According to the channel's staff, the double "was forbidden to have meaningful conversations and hold long meetings, for fear of embarrassment or making mistakes. The same is true of the visit to Mariupol. The double was photographed but did not speak much and did not stay anywhere for too long."
Vladimir Putin on a surprise visit to Mariupol, Ukraine, March 18, 2023 (Photo: Reuters)
In Mariupol, the president was seen on a nighttime drive without a seat belt with little security in sight.
"Putin's 'spontaneous' trips around Mariupol at the wheel, without blocking the streets, without a convoy of guards, and going out 'to the people' in the occupied city on the front line is not only unrealistic, it's not even funny. The president was hundreds of miles away at the time Many kilometers away, in a completely warm and safe place," they claimed and concluded that Putin with his "pathological cowardice" would not "risk his precious life," the channel concluded.
Russian opposition politician Gennady Gudkov was also among those who confidently claim that it was not Putin but his double who visited the Ukrainian city.
"Now, when a war is going on, I don't rule out the possibility that someone very similar to or disguised as Putin is playing his role," Gudkov said.
"We see when the real Putin goes around Moscow people are stuck in traffic for hours because they block the whole city if Putin is driving with his motorcade of 40 armored vehicles, so it's not clear which one he's in. Then we see another Putin driving a Toyota through Crimea. I Do not believe".
The independent Russian media also noted the fact that during the visit Putin met and talked with locals, walked around the city and drove in a car - which astonished journalists that this was the same gramphobe leader who negotiated with French President Emmanuel Macron from the opposite end of a six-meter long table, and who forced Russian security officials and members of parliament to be in quarantine for weeks before meeting with them.
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Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian author and opposition politician, believes that Putin uses doubles for smaller meetings and some public appearances, although he does appear in person for meetings with state leaders or to deliver speeches.
He's sure that Putin would luckily "never humiliate" Chinese leader Xi Jinping by sending a double to the meeting, but that's not the case in Ukraine, he says: "In Mariupol, it wasn't Putin. It was a double."
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