Vladimir Putin has set up identical offices in multiple locations across Russia to confuse potential assassins in yet another sign that the despot is paranoid about his safety, a Russian intelligence officer who fled the country over the Ukraine war said.
Putin has become so obsessed with his own safety that he designed the offices in St Petersburg, Sochi and Novo-Ogaryovo to look exactly the same, Gleb Karakulov, an officer in the Russian president’s secretive elite personal security service, said.
The offices are identical, with matching details down to the desk and wall hangings, and official reports sometimes say he’s in one place when he’s actually in another.
When Putin was in Sochi, security officials would deliberately pretend he was leaving, bringing in a plane and sending off a motorcade, when he was in fact staying in the city, Karakulov revealed.
‘This is, firstly, a ruse to confuse foreign intelligence and secondly, to prevent any attempts on his life,’ Karakulov told the Dossier Center, a Russian investigative journalism project.
This confirmed previous media reports by Russian outlet Proekt Media showing how Putin’s office in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi and his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo near Moscow were identical.
