Vladimir Putin is potentially seriously ill, reports have suggested for months and months now. If, that is, you believe the countless reports making the claim that keep popping up.
Leaked U.S. intelligence reports from this past spring indicated that Ukrainian officials believed that Putin was undergoing chemotherapy, according to The New York Times.
A post on the Russian Telegram channel “Z-blogger” on August 28 said, “God, don’t you leave us. Pray to God you are alive and healthy.” That raised speculation about Putin’s health.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, shared the Telegram post on X and asked, “What is going on?”
Putin Chemotherapy Claim Possibly Corroborated
Social media accounts belonging to a purported general in Russia’s external intelligence agency, the SVR, suggest that Putin could be near death.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin is indeed very ill, and everyone who is close to him not only knows about the imminent and inevitable but is also trying to prepare for it,” General_SVR wrote on Thursday.
19FortyFive cannot confirm the authenticity of the report. However, it clearly shows more and more chatter about Putin being ill.
General_SVR seemed to corroborate, at least in theory, what Ukrainian officials claims saying over the past year “… #Putin has cancer. He is treated and provided with medicines by doctors.”
Separately he noted that Putin suffered from frequent nausea and reduced appetite due to the medications he is taking for his alleged cancer, which would be consistent with chemotherapy.
“#Russian President Vladimir Putin was resting yesterday. He was very tired after meeting with #Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. These negotiations took a lot of energy from the president, who is suffering from cancer, and now he is trying to recover by staying in Sochi,” General_SVR wrote in a post crossposted between X and Telegram.
The independent Russian news media site Proekt claimed that Putin had been visited repeatedly by oncologists since 2019.
“Oncologist-surgeon Evgeny Selivanov is one of the most frequent medical attendants of Putin. Over the course of four years, the doctor has flown to him 35 times and spent a total of 166 days with the head of state. He was present near Putin both during his official stay in Sochi and during the head of state’s ‘disappearances’. In August 2017, Putin disappeared from the public eye for a long time, from August 8 to 16. All this time six medics were in Sochi, including otolaryngologist Shcheglov and oncology surgeon Selivanov,” Proekt reported in April 2022. “Only otolaryngologists Igor Esakov and Alexey Shcheglov fly to Putin more often than the oncology surgeon — the latter has flown to him 59 times and stayed by his side for 282 days. All three of them work together very often — in four years they have been to Sochi at least 18 times.”
Again, 19FortyFive cannot confirm such information, but again, is important to note considering the consistent rumors about Putin’s health.
Putin Uses Body Double
The general claims that Putin uses a body double to hide his illness from the world. He also allegedly suffers from schizoaffective disorder and Parkinson’s in addition to cancer. Other news outlets have increasingly reported the same thing. The Independent noted that photos increasingly show Putin on the other end of a long marble table away from his visitors.
U.S. intelligence takes the reports with a grain of salt.
“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health,” CIA Director William Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum last year. “And as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
