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Vladimir Putin using body double after Wagner mutiny? ‘He’s hiding as…'
The marked departure from Vladimir Putin's patterns is "extraordinary," Matthew Wyman said.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is using a body double during public engagements in the wake of the Wagner Group armed rebellion, an expert told Newsweek. Following the mercenaries' aborted military rebellion, the Russian leader appeared before crowds in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. Videos showed the leader shaking hands with the public and meeting a schoolgirl as well as posing for photos.
But Western journalists questioned the behavior displayed in the clips, as did prominent Russian military bloggers like Igor Girkin. The marked departure from Vladimir Putin's patterns is "extraordinary," Matthew Wyman, a senior lecturer at the UK's Keele University said, adding, "There is no question that that was not Vladimir Putin. That was a body double.”
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It is "totally inconceivable" that the Russian leader would carry out an engagement in person, he said, continuing, “You are not going to put yourself in any groups of unfamiliar people at all.”
"In all sorts of ways, Putin just does not act like that," he said, adding that his body language did not match up to the past behaviors of a “man who does not show emotion publicly.”
Putin is "highly, highly cautious about who he lets near him," Matthew Wyman added. Reports have previously claimed that owing to Covid, the Russian leader had put strict quarantine measures in place to protect himself from the risk of infection. A former senior Russian security officer had also said that the Kremlin leader "surrounds himself with an impenetrable barrier of quarantines."
"Putin is not known to let anyone close to him (since the COVID-19 pandemic), and here we see him taking selfies with normal people," he said.
Earlier, Moscow denied that Vladimir Putin uses body doubles as Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed reports as "yet another lie" in April.
