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Putin’s Health in Question Once Again After Official Kremlin Video Release Shows Obvious Signs of Manipulation

This isn't just obvious – it's downright creepy.

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I will be the first to say that years of writing politics has made me a bit of a skeptic, and even I get fooled by some hoaxes online still. Just last week I was taken in by the false claim that Trump had nominated Lauren Boebert to be Education Secretary.

I can hardly be blamed for that one, of course. He could have nominated Dr. Vermin Plaguespreader as head of the CDC and I would have believed it. The man is on a roll with awful picks right now.

But it’s not often that something comes from overseas that makes it to America that faces much speculation as to its veracity. It could be that Americans don’t care enough to speculate on foreign internet rumors, or it could just be that we’re not aware enough of the zeitgeist of current affairs in other places to know when to be on the lookout for fake quotes, news releases, or videos.

This one has me beside myself in both its obviousness and the source of it.

There’s been speculation that 72-year-old Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, has been ill in the past. That’s not news; he’s getting along in age, and given that the average lifespan in Russia is just over 72 years old, it would be no surprise to find there’s something physically manifesting itself.

Couple that with the fact that he’s either been Prime Minister or President of Russia for nearly 3 decades, and job toll starts to add to the equation.

But if I’m being honest, I thought that rumors of using body doubles or otherwise covering up someone’s illness or death were limited to the QAnon kooks here in America.

Remember that guy?

But really, rumors (and silly ones at that) about Joe Biden or lizard men or JFK Jr. coming back to life have always just sounded the same as the Pizzagate conspiracy, the flat earth theory, or the idea that birds aren’t real. To me, anyway.

With the release of an official response video from the Kremlin in which “Putin” addresses the intended use of hypersonic missiles in a strike against Ukraine, though, we may be looking at an effort to conceal that there’s something wrong with the Russian dictator.

Watch the following videos in order, because they get stranger as it goes on. The Former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Anton Gerashchenko, is a current advisor to the same department in Ukraine. He posted two copies of the official Kremlin video, one in normal playback mode with subtitles, and one in high-speed mode to point out something very, very odd.

First, the normal playback:

Everything appears normal, and there’s no reason to suspect that anything is amiss. It’s very clearly the voice of Putin as we’ve heard it over the years, or the best impression of him that anyone’s ever done. You wouldn’t suspect it was an impression, however, because nothing else seems “off” at all.

Then we see a sped-up version, which Gerashchenko has captioned with what he believes is strange about the video:

He captions it like so:

If you speed up the video, it is visible that Putin’s hands are not moving and look like they are separate from his body.

The sound and lip movement do not correspond at times.

What do you think?

Gerashchenko commented later in the social media thread that comments from “Russian bots and trolls” had made him think that “there is something indeed there [that’s doctored].”

Putin hasn’t been seen in public since his last appearance at a conference in Sochi, the site of the last Olympics held in Russia. Doctors have released “official reports” that Putin’s health is fine, but the general consensus seems to be that the leader may be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and that his hands shake uncontrollably without intervention.

In a video with another Russian official in 2022, Putin was seen tightly gripping a table as if to keep his hands as still as possible. But even that would simply be a trick you could pull off in person. You cannot duplicate absolutely motionless and relaxed hands for the entirety of a 20-minute video.

What’s more, in a third analysis posted by filmmaker Patrick Hölscher, he explains that the hands are clearly overlaid onto the video, and zooms in as much as possible to highlight the area around his necktie moving back and forth behind his hands. The green screen is so obvious it’s hard to understand how you missed it the first time.

Officially, of course, the government of Russia will never confirm anything like this. Putin has been the backbone of the country since he took power so many years ago, and the stories of his “tough guy” image are the stuff of legend.

But some stories have been hard to contain. Proekt Media, one of the few non-state news outlets in Russia, reported all the way back in 2022 the claim that Putin was routinely seen by a team of doctors.

According to Newsweek, “Proekt alleged that two ear, nose, and throat specialists have regularly visited Putin, as has an oncology surgeon who specializes in thyroid cancer. Proekt’s report also alleged that Putin had been using an alternative therapy that involved bathing in blood extract from severed deer antlers.”

Government officials in Russia dismissed those claims out of hand. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a journalist that cancer rumors were “Fiction and untruth.”

The problem for Americans reading this story is as I already said: We simply don’t have a frame of reference for this stuff. Even the crazy rumors that go around in this country are sometimes mind-blowing for someone who hasn’t heard them before, and we just don’t hear enough about things like this happening in other countries to give it much critical thinking.

We know everything about our own politicians — I could tell you in casual conversation which and how many languages are spoken in the Trump family among all of them. I know right off the top of my head that Trump’s birthday is on Flag Day (although maybe that one’s not fair, since that’s my niece’s birthday too).

I’ve long felt like this kind of knowledge was a curse. It is helpful when I write these articles, because there are a lot of things I don’t have to look up — I have something like a sponge inside my skull that hasn’t been wrung out for years.

But why would I know intimate details of foreign leaders? I had to look up what year Putin even joined the Russian government, and I had NO IDEA how old he was before writing this story. Frankly, he looks pretty good for his age.

But to my mind, these videos, even if they don’t conclusively prove that Putin has cancer or Parkinson’s specifically, show that they’re trying to hide something from the world.

I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it is.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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