Rumours of using body doubles have surged after the ‘dictator’ was caught on a video walking across Red Square without security.
A woman was being filmed when ‘Putin’ seemed to walk behind her. He was heading as if from the red-brick Kremlin in central Moscow towards the illuminated elite GUM department store. Her friend filming her says: “There's Putin walking….”
The woman in the footage raises her hands to her mouth in shock at the president suddenly passing by. She calls after him ‘Grandpa?’ - a derogatory nickname for the despot who will be 72 on Monday.
No security was visible while the real Putin is normally surrounded by dozens of armed operatives, some carrying fold-up bulletproof shields, and often his nuclear briefcase enabling him to start atomic war at any moment. The man in the footage with a strong resemblance to Putin walked without the autocrat’s trademark duck-like waddle or “gunslinger’s gait”.
The footage posted by the woman in the image Diana Pilkevich, 20, from Minsk, went viral and gathered 7.6 million views in two days. For years Putin has been reported to use multiple doppelgängers, even for key events, lookalikes who have undergone plastic surgery and intense training in the ex-KGB spy’s mannerisms.
One Telegram channel - General SVR - even insists that the real autocrat died almost one year ago, and body doubles have permanently replaced him, controlled by Kremlin security chiefs, fooling the entire . Commenters joked over the new footage: “The double finished his shift” with almost 300,000 likes.
Another said this was proof the doubles do exist. There was speculation the doppelgänger was on his way to catch a metro train to go home after a busy day “mimicking Putin”.
One more stated sarcastically: “Of course, the president of the largest country in the world walks down the street without security.” Another stated that when Putin usually goes out “he closes half of Moscow for 10 hours”. Yet here he apparently “went out for a walk without security for fun”.
“He probably went to the local 24-hour store,” said another. Putin is known to be paranoid about security, and especially the risk of assassination during his war against .
“Sadly, I don't have a license for a gun,” read one blast at the dictator. Rumours about Putin using doubles reached a highpoint during the pandemic and in the early stages of the war in Ukraine.
