Vladimir Putin has been mocked after allegedly sending in a body double to war-ravaged Mariupol in a high security visit today (March 20).
Kyiv official Anton Gerashchenko posted three images of Putin’s chin, questioning whether Putin was running scared of public visits and was in fact using a lookalike.
The official quipped: “What’s up with your chin, Putin?”
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“Looks like lately his make-up artists (i.e. for the recent trips of the bunker man to the occupied Crimea and Mariupol) had to work with quite a low-quality copy, not even a double but its copy.
“I wonder which one of them was real?” The Interior Minister advisor taunted.
One picture showed Putin, 70, a year ago at an address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow while the other showed Putin’s reported visit to naval port Sevastopol in Crimea on March 18.
The third photo was from footage released the following day appearing to show the dictator in war-blitzed Mariupol.
In the first image, his chin looks less flabby and more tight, while in the second image in Sevastopol appears far more saggy.
A Russian source said: “He has these moments when he looks like a babushka [grandmother] without teeth.”
There have been strong rumours that Putin uses a body double for public appearances and is becoming more cowed about appearing himself while the war continues to rage on.
Today, Telegram channel General SVR, which tracks information about the war from inside Russia, claimed Putin had not been to Sevastopol or Mariupol.
“The information from the Kremlin's resources that Vladimir Putin visited Crimea and Mariupol is NOT true,” they said.
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"In Crimea, a double of the president was noted with a short visit and solely for the sake of a video photo shoot.”
They also claim the Putin doppelganger was “forbidden to conduct meaningful conversations and hold long meetings, fearing embarrassment or another [mistake] of the understudy.”
In Mariupol, the president was spotted on an evening drive not wearing a seat belt while no security around him could be seen, adding to speculation a body double was being used.
“The President was at that time many hundreds of kilometres away, warm and completely safe,” SVR say.
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