Putin does use body doubles and has a ‘clean zone’ where staff have to quarantine before getting close to him, a Russian investigation has claimed.
The extent of Putin’s distancing is noted in the report by Russian media outlet Proekt.
Putin health news today
People who constantly accompany the Russian president spend time in the so-called ‘clean zone’ – a boarding house where only quarantined people live and work, according to the report.
They can leave their rooms and are allowed to walk around the allocated area. The Sochi sanatorium ‘Rus’ was initially used as a ‘clean zone’, it adds.
Since then, the zones have appeared in other regions important to the president.
The investigators studied official events that Putin, who has declared he will run for yet another term as president, took part in from November 1 last year to October 31 this year, which amounted to 521.
At 43 per cent of them the president was visibly keeping a distance from his interlocutors in one way or another, according to the report.
There were 113 video meetings in total for the year, which included almost all Security Council meetings and all meetings with the government, the report noted, adding that when Putin does need to communicate with people in person, the Kremlin resorts to ‘wild security measures’.
The number of meetings at which Putin did not distance himself, but ‘most likely forced other people to quarantine,’ was 185 – almost 36 per cent of the total for the year, according to the report.
The investigation came as Putin bizarrely refused to stand within 70ft of Britain’s new ambassador to Moscow at a diplomatic ceremony this week – blaming ‘sanitary reasons’.
